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Managers in companies of all sizes get migraines trying to find candidates to fill skilled computer-related jobs, from programmer to network administrator. But nowhere is the ache of the labor shortage felt more acutely than at small companies. That's one finding of a recently published survey of managers who hire for information technology jobs at 700 U.S. companies with 50 or more employees.
The study found that these businesses need to fill about 1.6 million jobs this year in eight IT-related categories, including technical support, database development, and network design. The vast majority of the jobs, 1.4 million, reside in companies with 50 to 99 employees.
FEWER APPLICANTS. But these same companies are having a slightly harder time filling the slots than big corporations are. Small businesses said they expected to see qualified candidates for only 52% of the jobs. Employers of 1,000 or more were a bit more hopeful, at 56%.
Small businesses are seeing fewer qualified job applicants than big businesses for several reasons, says Harris N. Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, an industry trade group that commissioned the study. Small companies often cannot offer as generous salaries and benefits as do large corporations. They may also be less inclined to invest in on-the-job tech training for fear that employees will use their new, highly marketable skills to find more lucrative jobs elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Miller says, the most common remedy businesses seek to ease the labor shortage, farming out their technology work to specialized companies, is not really a solution. Why? All companies are fishing from the same small labor pool. Says Miller: "You're just moving the pain around."
By
Pamela Mendels
in New York
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