IT prospects not so great

In response to my Quandary column this week, about IT opportunities for schools leavers, a consultant who does not want to be named writes in to say that I've got it wrong, job prospects in the sector are NOT as good as I say they are, mainly because of cheaper workers being brought in from overseas to work on short-term contracts. Because of this situation, he absolutely would not advise school leavers to head for this sector.

This is what he says:

"There has been a great deal of hype about the "IT skills shortage" for many years, but for the most part this is a myth encouraged by recruitment agencies and especially by large outsourcing consultancies. I am concerned that by inadvertently endorsing this myth, you may be encouraging youngsters to aim for a career with very poor prospects.

"For example, at the end of last year there were around 30,000 IT professionals in the UK actively looking for work (I believe the current number is more like 50,000). At the same time, the major consultancies have "onshored" more than 34,000 IT workers (mainly from India) in the last year on intra-company transfers, which are exempt from the requirement to advertise the job in the UK, under the pretext that these skilled workers were not available on the UK market.

"In fact, the vast majority of these onshored workers are very junior staff, typically with little experience and no better skills than their UK counterparts, being mostly used as cheap IT cannon fodder to replace more experienced - and more expensive - UK-based workers. This is primarily a financial calculation: an Indian programmer will earn a small salary at home in India, and is then paid a small tax-free subsistence allowance in the UK. The total cost to their employer is far lower than even a modest IT salary for a UK-based worker, with no tax or NI obligations etc in the UK, and of course Indian staff typically have fewer employment rights at home and none at all within the UK. Even a UK-based graduate trainee costs more than a hire-and-fire onshored Indian worker.

"The result is that many companies have been actively replacing UK-based staff with cheaper onshored workers in this way, which reduces the number of jobs available for UK-based IT staff at all levels. This flood of inexperienced onshored staff is eliminating many of the junior roles for fresh IT graduates, and it is also eliminating the reservoir of skilled and experienced staff who could mentor younger entrants to the profession. Most onshored workers return home after a few months or a year or two, taking their skills/experience with them. In many cases, this will form part of a long-term outsourcing process to ship the work offshore as well, so the jobs are eliminated from the UK market altogether.

"Many of my experienced contemporaries have abandoned the profession altogether, while those of us who remain find ourselves out of work for months or even years at a time. Despite possessing a number of the alleged "shortage" skills and various professional qualifications, I have been out of work for 3 out of the last 7 years, and am now working on yet another project with a largely Indian, largely inexperienced team of junior staff and just a few more experienced UK-based professionals. These UK-based colleagues have all experienced the same phenomenon in their various workplaces in recent years. I see no prospect of our project taking on any junior UK staff in the foreseeable future, and I fear this is fairly typical of most mainstream IT projects these days.

"This issue is frequently discussed within the profession and is raised periodically in various forums. But the overwhelming commercial power of the major consultancies, their strong political connections (many public sector IT projects are dominated by consultancies who are enthusiastically onshoring staff in this way), and the general lack of organised labour in the IT industry mean that the situation is unlikely to be addressed honestly and openly any time soon.

"I realise too that this debate is often caricatured dismissively as "British jobs for British workers", whereas I would see it as a question of "UK-based jobs on sustainable UK salaries for UK-based workers", whatever their origin. Personally, I welcome the opportunity to work with and learn from experienced foreign colleagues, and I worked abroad myself for several years, on the same salary as my local colleagues, I hasten to add.

"But when the myth of the "IT skills shortage" is being used both deliberately to dismantle the UK IT profession through unnecessary onshoring, and inadvertently to mislead youngsters into aiming for a career in IT, I feel it is important for those of us with bitter experience within the profession to correct the mistaken assumptions of those outside the industry.

"There may still be opportunities for exceptionally talented youngsters in those smaller specialist areas that are less likely to get offshored to the great IT barns of Bangalore e.g. bio-informatics, forensic IT, IT security and others. But the days of being able to graduate from a general BSc in computing and expect to find a mainstream IT job with good long-term prospects are probably gone forever. Unless you're a real computer boffin, you'd be better off training as an electrician."