We all have been hearing about the "Great IT Talent Shortage" for some time now. Here is a recent one, a survey conducted by Deloitte of US HR Professionals, nearly three quarter of them stated talent shortage as their number one concern. The talent shortage drum roll has been going on for quite some time and the sad fact is - there may or may not be a shortage and we will never know for sure,  because the job market is not that efficient. Contrasting Efficiencies - The Stock Market versus The Job Market The stock market is efficient, the job market in general and the online job market in particular is not. Stocks are traded in a few specific places (specific stock exchanges), the online job market aka job boards are everywhere. In the stock market, supply and demand are matched automatically (with the advent of electronic trading). In the job market, the supply (you and me) and the demand (job openings) are to be found everywhere and there is no matching of them across all of the places they can be found. (This is the biggest reason for the existence of OdinJobs, which I will come to later)

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Answering the IT shortage questions emphatically one way or the other is near impossible because of the in-efficiencies of the online job market as listed above. Its like the blind men and the elephant, everybody is right (partially) and everybody maybe wrong. Sure there are long term macro trends like the number of US graduates with a engineering or computer science degree entering the workforce and the boomers starting to retire, but those trends do not explain why Acme, Inc is unable to find a mid-level SYS Admin  today.  One, there are no SYS Admins in the market, or they are looking in one place and the most qualified, well suited SYS Admin is in another place. What do you think is more likely..

 

Truthfully, we won't know for sure unless we have the information of all the available talent out there to come to the correct conclusion. The same holds good when you  are looking for a job. The state of the current job market plays up the role of chance and luck, way beyond the role it should play in matching supply and demand.

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Going into the last weeks of the year, the news around us is not pretty - sub-prime, falling US Dollar, and the talk of the dreaded "R" word is gaining strength.  Today, Market Watch has this report regarding layoffs. Here is another. Didn't mean to ruin your holidays, but what does this all mean for IT workers.

On one hand we have Oracle which posted a 35% rise in fiscal second-quarter profit today and they are hiring (Jobs in Oracle) but on the other hand we have major financial institutions, banking or otherwise reeling under the sub-prime exposure.

There is a theory that layoffs is a trailing indicator of a recession as employers do not want to lose their good employees and tend to hold off on making  a call on layoffs until well after a recession has begun. If we are already in a recession, it sure does not feel that way looking at the number of jobs advertised. OdinJobs has indexed well over 500,000 IT jobs in Nov and is on track to reach that mark in Dec.

There you have it, there are financial problems besetting us all but companies are still hiring, so what gives?

 

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