08 May The book is coming true – IT jobs market depressed
The book on offshoring and outsourcing written by our founder Scott Linden Jones predicts that many industries in Australia will suffer an extreme and rapid shift in jobs offshore.
Some commentators are clearly spotting this in the IT industry already.
The following was published on IT Wire on Tuesday. The only surprise here is the anecdotal link that university enrolments are reducing in the IT industry based upon the lack of jobs. We would expect that to take a few more years to really be noticeable, since offshoring impacting jobs is still not a well understood issue.
We can deny it no longer. Even the recruitment industry is now saying it. Offshoring has killed the local ICT jobs market.
Surprisingly, the latest confirmation that Australia is contributing to its own skilled jobs demise comes from a source that has in the past been accused of hyping the fictitious ICT skills shortage.
Listed recruiter Clarius, which owns the Candle ICT recruitment firm, in its latest Skills Indicator report, states that in the March quarter there was an oversupply of 1800 ICT professionals.
This compared to claimed surpluses of 1,500 and 1,200 for the September and December quarters last year respectively, self-serving figures that were viewed with so much scepticism that Clarius had difficulty getting a run for those reports in the tech media.
The fact is that Australia has not had an ICT skills shortage for many years thanks mainly to offshore outsourcing and to a lesser extent skilled migration.
These days ICT courses at tertiary institutions have difficulty attracting the numbers needed to keep them open. The courses that still operate are filled mainly with full fee paying foreign students. Australian school leavers avoid ICT courses like the plague because they believe there are no jobs when they finish.