Get smart to fuel the economy
By Dermot Corrigan
More advanced IT skills are vital if organisations are to take advantage of the opportunities to be offered by the forthcoming ‘smart’ economy. However, research conducted late last year by ICS Skills found that companies were more likely to be cutting their IT training budgets this year than investing in upskilling their staff.
Some 21 per cent of the Irish Computer Society member organisations polled said they would be cutting back on staff training, with only 15 per cent planning on increasing their training spend, according to ICS Skills chief executive Jim Friars.
“Unfortunately, companies are not looking to the future,” said Friars.” In fact, in many cases, they are not even looking at the present.”
Friars said that the more forward-thinking ICS member companies were looking at investing in new smart technologies this year.
“About a third of ICS members will be investigating cloud technology in 2010, in its various forms – platform, infrastructure and software as a service,” he said.” Some 40 per cent of ICS members have plans in the virtualisation area – to reduce costs, consolidate applications on under utilised hardware and increase availability.
“Perhaps in preparation for a move to cloud computing, data protection and IT security were the only areas where the majority of respondents had plans to extend what they are doing.”
Friars said that all IT users within companies – not just IT professionals – would require smart IT skills going forward.
“Al l employees need to be digitally literate as a prerequisite for a job at any level in a company. However, significant numbers of people over 30 years of age lack these skills, and are fearful of confronting this weakness,” he said.
“As companies emerge from their current difficulties, there is a vast potential for a greater contribution from employees with basic digital skills in word processing, desktop publishing, internet and e-mail. Working environments are gradually changing, and the modern employee must also be able to exploit social networking, blogs, wikis etc in order to do business in new and creative ways.”
Companies worried about their IT skills gaps should consider having their staff’s capabilities audited, Friars said.
“In an ICS survey, 70 per cent of respondents felt their organisations would benefit from an audit of their IT staff’s skills and experience,” he said.” Such audits highlight the strengths and weaknesses in organisations’ skillsets and help them plan their training and recruitment needs.”
ICS Skills is the skills and certification division of the Irish Computer Society. Headquartered in Dublin, ICS Skills has clients and accredited test centres nationwide.
