e-commerce skills - 02/2001

There has been a massive drop in demand for the programming languages needed, and meanwhile a crisis in e-commerce skills, says Philip Virgo, who researches the annual IT Skills Trends Report for the Institute for the Management of Information Systems.

The biggest shortage is in quality people brought up in the discipline of network sizing, technical infrastructure and integrating the Web with central systems. Very few people under 35 have this grounding.

Knowledge of the Java programming language has become the most sought-after skill in a quarterly survey of job advertisements by SSP, a research firm, for Computer Weekly - a 40 per cent increase in demand for Java skills in a quarter in which five Internet skills were in the top 12, the only ones showing a growth in demand.

This trend is confirmed by the National Computing Centre (NCC). Its new survey of IT staffing issues shows that 40 per cent of organisations have Internet skills as their top recruitment priority for 2001, compared with 30 per cent last year, and 60 per cent of organisations seeking new skills of any sort have the Internet on their shopping lists.

The number of respondents seeking e-commerce skills has increased rapidly and there is also greater emphasis now on specific development languages, notably Java and XML, says John Eary, the head of skills consultancy at the NCC.

Indeed, the perceived staff shortages are significantly higher for system development, at 8.8 per cent, and for technical support than for other groups. He adds: Job market expectations are buoyant. The number of IT staff generally will grow by 13 per cent and system development staff in particular by 17 per cent over the next two years.

The overall growth figures are not huge, certainly when compared with those of the late 1990s: employers surveyed by the NCC say their permanent staff shortages fell from 11 per cent to 7.3 per cent in 2000. The main problem is the imbalance between older programming language skills and new e-commerce experience that has arisen in the last year.

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