Adrian Schofield, manager of the JCSE's applied research unit, says the key to overcoming the skills shortage is to give the correct education from day one.
"It's too late to try and plug in the skills you need to somebody that doesn't have the appropriate background from school or university," he says. "Over time, we will learn that the skills pool depends on the right basic education."
While the skills shortage is wide, Schofield says it has yet to be quantified. He explains the general perception of the shortage is that we are in need of business analysts, systems analysts and project managers, but "even the ISETT SETA, that gets reports from 3 000 employers, admits it doesn't have the details of the shortage."
To properly quantify the skills shortage is one of the goals of the ITWeb/JCSE ICT Skills Survey 2008, which closes on 7 July and is available here.
Schofield explains that the survey aims to "provide the market with some fairly clear indicator as to priority areas for the skills to be developed and the ways they can be developed".
The survey aims to get two views from the respondents: That of the individual practitioners, who are interested in how to develop their own skills, and at the corporate level, companies need to know which skills to retain.
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