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Project management skills in short supply
CIO Forum: And staff attrition getting worse...

By Andy McCue

Published: Tuesday 16 October 2007

Almost half of UK tech departments are suffering from a shortage of project management skills.

More than 40 per cent of delegates at silicon.com's CIO Forum conference this week said project management is the skill in shortest supply.

Jonathan Steel, CEO of the Bathwick Group, who conducted the research, said: "People are being hovered up by consultants and outsourcers."

Skills Survey 2007

Find out the results of this year's Skills Survey:

♦  Are CIOs getting less cash?
♦ How the staffing crisis is deepening
♦ How techie salaries are faring
♦ Offshoring still a hot potato
♦  Banks hardest hit by staff crisis
♦ Industry falling out of love with IT grads

Four out of five delegates (80 per cent) also said their organisation has technical IT skills gaps and almost half (42 per cent) said those gaps are "significant and identifiable".

Steel said: "The situation is getting worse."

However, a breakdown of those figures reveals the technical skills shortage is not universal across all organisations, with larger companies suffering more than small and medium-sized businesses.

Staff turnover is another big issue for IT departments. The median employee attrition rate in the IT departments of CIO Forum delegates is six per cent, although a few are as high as 10 per cent, and a third said the problem is getting worse.

Other reported skills shortages are around high-level architecture and design roles.

The most common way of filling these skills gaps is through temporary workers with nearly 40 per cent of delegates using contractors or freelancers on fixed-term contracts.

When quizzed about their next career move, most of the CIO Forum delegates said they planned to move to a better IT-related role in another organisation. The least popular options were staying in their current role or joining an IT vendor.