New Workforce Survey Results

The latest Foote Partners LLC skills survey shows demand for applications, BI, networking, and security skills is quite strong, pushing pay up. Other new workforce studies show the gains attained from workforce planning by best in class organizations as well as who is bearing the brunt of staff cuts.

Focal Points:

• Foote Partners' latest quarterly survey shows the market for enterprise applications skills have risen dramatically despite the economy. Several SAP skills have grown between 25 and 30 percent in value over the past six months, pushing pay up more than 19 percent. For the same time period, the other skills increasing in value (in decreasing order) are unified messaging, wireless network management, network security management, PHP, business intelligence, Oracle Workflow, and ERP skills. In the course of the past year, the percent change in average medium premium pay has risen for these non-certified skill areas between 4.4 and 6.3 percent. Conversely, for the same annual period, certified pay premiums declined for most categories, with IT security being the only exception. That category saw its increase in premium grow two percent. Web development saw the largest decline with a fall of 19.3 percent for the year. Overall for the year non-certified skills saw a 4.6 percent positive change in value while certified skills incurred a 3.5 percent decrease in value.
• The Aberdeen Group's study on workforce planning by best-in-class enterprises found their workforce planning efforts improved their ability to recruit and retain talent. Best-in-class organizations are aggressively identifying emerging job roles and missions, implementing career acceleration and leadership development programs, and partnering with local schools and institutions to help develop future workers with needed skills. As a result, these companies on average have increased employee retention by 31 percent, improved workforce capacity utilization by 31 percent, enhanced employee performance by 27 percent, and boosted skills availability by 23 percent.
• A newly released Info-Tech Research Group study shows that IT staff reductions have hit entry level and intermediate employees the hardest, with that group experiencing 44 percent of the cuts. Management was the next hardest hit, with 19 percent of the reductions come from that group. Contractors got 17 percent of the cuts while senior IT staff bore 15 percent. Consultants only saw a five percent reduction.

Experton Group believes workforce planning and management is key to IT being able to satisfy current and future business demands without interruptions, unexpected resource constraints and unreasonable costs. Human resource management today requires a three to five year human resource analysis of internal staff, contingent workers, and outsourcing and short- and long-term strategies to address the gaps and manage the process. IT executives should ensure that a comprehensive human resource analysis is performed as part of this year's budget planning process, and the issues and corrective actions folded into the department's overall plans for the upcoming cycles.