Canadian tech jobs: The hiring ups and downs explained

There are people in the Canadian technology industry who are perfectly prepared to chop off your head if you use the phrase “skills shortage.” Fortunately, I’m not one of them.

Ever since the mid-1990s, when the Internet and personal computing was starting to spawn an enormous industry in Silicon Valley, there have been fears that too many talented Canadians would move south as part of a technology “brain drain.” There have also been ongoing fears that the outsourcing of IT departments in many companies will leave many Canadians jobless. Then there are the fears that, given how fast technology evolves, we just can’t keep up with the right kind of IT know-how, and important company positions will remain vacant.

This made the recent hiring forecast by recruiting firm Robert Half Technology all the more surprising. Every few months the company surveys the senior IT executive in just under 300 organizations to see whether they plan to add any people in the coming quarter. In the first quarter of this year, for example, 14 per cent of chief information officers (CIOs) said they were hiring. In the second quarter forecast, released earlier this week, that’s now down to 7 per cent.

Leslie Heathers, metro market manager at Robert Half Technology, told me in a phone conversation that you have to put it in perspective. “Companies have been more hesitant to hire. They’ve been treading lightly, seeing what’s happening,” she said. More important, she suggested, was the 87 per cent of those surveyed who said they are somewhat or very confident in their company’s prospects for growth. “We’re busier than ever.”

Some firms may be holding back because they’re trying to figure out what a purely technology-based role is going to be in 2013 and beyond. As more consumer technology invades the office, there may be less need for some of the basic help desk services. There is also the influx of cloud computing services whereby a third party provider can run a company’s application or other resources online. This may not mean we’ll see less hiring in IT, but that almost everyone will be expected to know a little more about technology.

“We’re seeing a lot of split functionality now where someone wants people to do 70 per cent of a financial function but also a technology function,” Heathers said.

That doesn’t always work out well, though. In an off-the-record conversation last week, an IT executive told me he was frustrated by operations staff who don’t want to adapt to changing technology and the lack of available IT workers who can wrap their head around a specific organization’s needs. “I’m just dealing with a lot of incompetence,” he said.

The biggest problem? People don’t put enough thought into what their actual IT needs are. “Many times companies will have a job description on their Web site and they’ll tell us, ‘Oh that one’s old. We just put that up there to see if we get any hits,’” said Heathers. “That’s the very first thing that a candidate asks us for. It’s not about where the job is or even always what the pay is, it’s what is the role?”

Hopefully if only 7 per cent are hiring in the near future, that means some of this groundwork is getting underway. There are always going to be companies looking to hire IT people. We may just not call them IT people.