IT pay jumps as skills gap widens

Where's Mine

Where is my payrise????????

Nice to see the CBI involved

I wonder whom the CBI think is doing the offshoring, so dissuading people from considering a career in IT.

CBI members off course. So, having dumped these jobs overseas, they now complain that no one wants to do them any more. Maybe, just maybe, if the CBI membership treated their staff as having some worth, then perhaps these problems would not have happened in the first place.

Physician, heal thyself!

rofl

hahahahahahahaha....

really....and in the real world....

*nelson* HAW HAW!

1./ Offshore to morons to save money

2./ ???

3./ Profit!

4./ Hire highly paid contractors (if you can find them) to clear up the disasterous mess that resulted from step 1

/Paris, cos even she'd do a better job than some project managers

Mwahaha!

I'm glad I am where I am today! (support + sysadmin)

I certainly found it very hard to get my first entry level IT job 2 years ago, I ended up forking out 5 grand for courses from http://www.justit.co.uk/, to get some Windows and Hardware qualifications, it was my only way in.

IT's dead end job, with no prospects...

about time someone piped up about the implosion of IT jobs.

Well if it stops the like of those mickey mouse training/employment scammers from dumping uber-crap technicians on the market, all the better.

(I've already been involved in the evaluation and sacking of 5 of those id10t monkeys from IT Projects over the last 9 years) .

It would also help if the current big industry employers didnt treat thier 1st/2nd line support staff like disposable slaves, were not here to be worked to death, just cos the management want to blow thier budget on golf trips to scotland instead of on paying a half decent rate for current overworked workers and taking on more staff to cope with rising workload from additional projects they keep dreaming up, instead of burning thier staff out.

(did they even wonder why they have such a high turnover rate of contract staff??? and all of a sudden no agency in the region ia able to supply experienced contractors, cos all the available techie's refuse to work with them as they all complain the managers treat them like dirt).

If i want to experience burnout again, i'll go back to london and work trade floors...

in east anglia, there are currently 50+ technicians chasing the same job vacancy.

and with employers taking the piss at less than £10 per hour, it looks like there will be a lot more.

time to see about retraining as plumber, car mechanic, supermarket shelf filler(lidl's and Aldi are recruiting again;p )

mines the green one with blue piping.... (where the price is right) ;p

One thing I've noticed

as one of those 'highly paid contractors', there are some things I have noticed within the British workforce.

I was fortunate enough to join the internet revolution as a network engineer in '95, and as there weren't very many of us we had to know a bit of everything, including how the whole 'darned thing' (tm) works from voltages to bits to protocols to wiring lengths and duplexes and AS filtering.

The other day I met a 'firewall' engineer who didn't know anything about routing - I had to restrain myself from shouting "YOU'RE FIREWALL IS A FUCKING ROUTER YOU MORON" because I realised that his training had been focussed on one task. That's what we have now, all specialists and no-one who can think laterally.

This is why I still have a highly paid contract job, 'coz there aren't many youngsters to knock me off my perch.

Life's a bitch aint it :D

Aside from my silly comment

I still can't understand some of the job specs agency’s routinely send out. They ask for 3 pages worth of skills and experience and offer the minimum wage in return.

Some of the bigger name companies are just as bad. Rackspace with their fanatical interviews is a good example of a big company taking the piss and scaring people off.

Why jump through hoops to work for a full time company, when you can experience exactly the same level of job security, yet earn 5 times more and escape from all the politics and other rubbish that comes with working for them by being a contractor?

Companies may be complaining that there is no one to do the basic jobs. That is their own fault.

Why work for shit, get treated like shit and know that you will get sacked/replaced/outsourced at the drop of a hat?

If I was joining the job market now, then I wouldn’t go near IT or any of its bastard little red-headed cousins.......

Hard to get a job?

Sorry, but I just don't get it...

I've got no qualifications above A/S level, I had no experience of a commercial environment, yet I still got a job as IT tech support...

10 months later I was offered a contract from another firm offering 160% of my then current salary. A job I only applied for just to "see what happened".

So that's 2 jobs, in less than a year, with no qualifications and less than a years experience.

In the end, my current job gave me a pay rise, but the point still stands...

Oh yeah i am getting a pay rise...

... By moving back to Aus to work. Stuff the UK.

Re: When entry level doesn't mean entry level.

Welcome to Britain, the only country in the world where skills are irrelevant and you are hired entirely on experience. It does not matter if you can drive a certain system, what matters if you have "touched it".

I found this out the hard way looking for my last job. At the end of the day I got hired by a non-British manager. That was the only way to break the vicious circle of: "You have not touched system A, version X and so you are not suitable regardless of the fact that you have written system B and worked with all systems C to Z". Even then, after passing the job interview, I got scheduled for an extra interview with two British upper level managers who asked questions _ONLY_ related to experience, none of them to skill.

This is not surprising, it is in fact a function of outsourcing. Understanding the subject matter is no longer required for management, what is required is to be able to manage a relationship with an off-site crew in Bangalore. As a result the current crop of managers with hiring rights are incapable to interview you based on skill. To put it bluntly - they are not competent enough for that. They can relay only on your experience. And this is the case in 99% of British IT.

Disclaimer - I have 20+ years of industry experience and top level skills across the board (network, software development and system administration) along with an MSc in a non-IT area. So this is not just a problem at beginner level - it is a problem all the way to the top of the technical skill ladder.

So frankly, if you want to work in IT your choices are:

"find non-British manager in a UK organisation" - tough, it may take years.

"ignore any job postings from British organisations" - does not really help as the local IT department can be run by Mr Faulty.

"emigrate"

The last option is the only sure one. I suggest you check the Australian embassy website. It is good for young people, if you are young you get extra points.

More bullshit...

do you honestly think three science classes will offset the fact that paying a citizen at home will cost more than paying some cheap slave producer in another country? If you pull the leg any harder, it'll come off.

I tried to pick up some programming languages during my time out of the market. However, taking a class doesn't mean anything - employers want documentable work experience now, and too much of it (typically 5 years or more). Add the fact that there's no entry-level jobs (those get outsourced), and you have a vacuum...and the source of the vacuum are those other countries. When high-level employees in the US and UK retire, the mid-level employees get promoted, but there's no low-level employees to promote to replace the mid-level ones. Those mid-level jobs get cut (the low-level jobs were outsourced a long time ago). Then, when the next round of high-level employees retire, there's no one to replace them, and the high-level jobs get cut. Now, you're outsourcing everything. Once that happens, it's like the oil industry - the countries we outsource to can charge us whatever they think we'll pay (and we sure will pay). This is the future of IT in the UK and US if they don't stop outsourcing and give us our jobs back.

I know, because it's happening to me right now in the US. I've been out of the market for 6 years, and I just got word back that a position I applied for, in the county where I live (mostly rural) had over 100 applicants for that position (PC Technician). I never even got an interview, and I have a BS in Computer Science, a MS in Applied Information Technology, and an A+ Certification! My parents and I spent tens of thousands of dollars in education for this?! College and certifications aren't worth a damn thing!!

If the government keeps allowing this, there will soon be no jobs in-country besides fast food and hotel jobs. Not even road-building jobs. I mean, why have roads if there are no jobs to commute to? Maybe that's how they plan to solve the budget deficit - if there are no jobs, all of the people will leave the country, and the government won't have to pay for any services anymore. They can disassemble the government, and replace it with a dictatorship by corporations for corporations, and any people who are foolish enough to remain behind will be slaves (literally).

Flame, because our future is going down in flames as we speak. Stop free trade NOW, or we will all become slaves.

Henry Ford

Henry Ford?

He paid his workers well by the standards of the time so they would be able to buy the cars they manufactured. No fool he.

Class homework exercise: explain how this is analogous to the issues discussed in the forgoing Register article.

If this assignment is too challenging, a simpler one: farmers set aside the seed of their best plants to sow in the next season. Explain the analogy.

The odd thing is that when I was "doing IT", the best programmers and analysts had degrees in all sorts of subjects: psychology, electrical engineering, chemistry, history. It's clear to me that good IT people are born that way, and all their education does is teach them how to think, sensu latu.

Paris because she's a fabulous success in spite of having (as far as anyone knows) next to no education. She's got the genes for success at what she does.

The reason for a 'skills shortage'

Here is why there are so few talented people (I speak from personal experience in as a moderately skilled but inexperienced Comp Sci graduate). They look for jobs and get this as a result:

"junior web assistant wanted. Duties involve uploading press releases to website and general site maintenence.

Required skills:

HTML, Javascript, ASP, .net, PHP, Flash, CSS, VBA, obscure CMS v1.3829, Java, C, virtual server. Min 2 years experience needed. £12,000pa"

Now the job would require 1/3rd of those skills at best and aside from the basics, would need only a light understanding yet you get these ads that are supposed to be entry level requiring an insane range of skills and they don't want to pay for it.

I lucked out with my job, I was actually applying for something completely different and my boss saw my skills and offered me a web developer job. I'm not a skilled coder by any means by my boss is getting a cheap developer and I'm getting vital skills and experience. We both win. If more employers too a chance with "techies" they can get huge benefits too.

On-shore but off-shore

In the sector of IT I currently work in the company I work for has discovered that it is increasingly hard to compete with those companies who offer offshoring (mainly India, but now being undercut by East Europeans) at off shore prices/rates but the people actually work here in UK on the client's site. Something that perhaps should be addressed to level the playing field for UK workers who by comparison seem alot more expensive.

The robots are coming

The situation down among us industrial robots is much the same, ok it does'nt have the glamour of fixing a server farm, but its fun programming them to grasp the boss by the neck ;-)

For years the companies that need people like me have used a recruitment policy of 'steal someone from another company' because they are too cheap to train people

Now we have the problem in that all our senior engineer guys are retiring, leaving us middle aged farts to look after things... but there's no one below us waiting to take our place.

Oh and the skills set needed with experience :

Mastercam/Solidworks 2-5 yrs

Faunc/ISO G-code including macros 5yrs+

Heidenhain conversational 5 yrs+

Design and build special purpose fixturing.

General production problem solving

Yes all the above earns you a grand total of £21 000 - £24 000 a yr basic

Which explains why exactly no one wants to do industrial robot programming

Boris

<<<dead chuffed because he got a VNC client tunneling via shh to a remote server for the first time today (there's the IT angle )

Re: The UK skills shortage & the CBI.

A few minor points:

Quote: "Unfortunately Poland doesn't make IT gurus in numbers. You can be sure they'd have been brought in if they had."

It does. But they do not want to come. The major difference between IT gurus and 5 pound per hour strawberry pickers is that the IT gurus a very well aware that 20K in the UK buys them less than 10K in Poland. They are staying there and taking the work there to them. Same for Romania, Bulgaria, etc. Nearly every IT guru CV I see from there has on the bottom "not willing to relocate". They are happy to take your work if you bring it to them and they actually deliver. I know a number of companies that have taken advantage of this opportunity and are using it to get work done. They are paying fairly steep per-head rates for this as well. However they are getting work done and they know that the relationship with the contractor is long term (see below).

Quote: "The company I work for is struggling to recruit useful people in Mumbai, because of the shortage. "

The shortage is due to 3 factors.

1 - useful people are not produced in a "yes sir, we shall do so sir" culture oriented towards cost savings instead of deliverables.

2 - If anyone was useful he/she has already been imported. The remains are runts and failures, bitter from inability to succeed in their ultimate goal - to escape to the promised land.

3. - As you correctly noted the very few with skills are auctioning constantly to the highest bidder. However, it is not just the few with skills. It is everyone. When a business is built around the idea that it demonstrates lower per-head costs to its customer, the business cannot maintain successful employee retention. The average time an employee is with one Indian outsourcing company is under 1.5 years. There is no need to say what this does to any long term projects. We all know. Compare this to Eastern European IT companies that in some places even go for 1 year (yes, 1 year) maternity leave entitlement just to secure and retain qualified staff. Salaries, loyalty bonuses, etc - you name it. In fact their IT staff is probably better payed (compared to the living standard in the country) than us in the UK. By far.

It has already been said ...

... but it bears saying again:

"Earlier this month the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) said that Britain’s brightest kids should be required to study three separate science courses in secondary school to offset a shortage of employees in the IT and science sectors."

Won't work, given the piss-poor salaries in the sciences (and scientific research in particular) - for me, I moved into IT after doing my PhD (in computational physics) and the usual gamut of postdoc appointments because the pay was a hell of a sight better. Losing the ability to roll in at lunchtime and work until 2-3am was a minor inconvenience.

In addition, from my experience of teaching undergraduate physics and electronics students, the CBI would be better employed in encouraging quality over quantity. You wouldn't believe the number of kids who didn't even have basic calculus ability, and this is for a physics course at a 'top 5' university FFS. To the CBI, I say get your heads out of your arses and take a look at what's going on in the real world. Not giving out A-grade A-level passes with cornflakes would be a very good start.

comp sci for an IT tech job?

That's the real tragedy. I thought that a comp sci degree was so you could go out and automate serious stuff from scratch, not just chase the latest web programming paradigm.

I think that we're in a period of degeneration through focus on details and flourishes, not the basics, kind of like the Baroque decadence.

Whether or not a Classic period will follow is anyone's guess, but my guess is that the Smalltalk crowd may figure prominently in another episode of the Eternal Return featuring Squeaky-clean code.

(With apologies to aManfromMars)

will code for bandwidth

i have half a degree in software engineering, and im considering dropping out to form my own business.

Not to make money, but merely to have a portfolio to show when i apply for a proper job.

Why should i finish when the course is almost completely java based. Im not being taught about pointers, or c# or mfc etc. I get extra marks for using collections and/or swing ffs.

I would work for £6 an hour (short term) if it got my foot on the ladder.

Any advice?

P.s. Sorry about the typos, am writing this from my phone.

Re: Re: The UK skills shortage & the CBI.

I'm from Poland. I'm here only because my wife doesn't speak polish. Wages in big cities are very often comparable, housing is at least twice cheaper than in UK and general costs of living also. Who would like to relocate?

Add to that mix managers that have experience AND education so they don't behave like British moronic counterparts. They expect you to work, but at the same time you know where everything's going. Projects are managed not hoped to "turn well". Studies are also much harder (on some degrees 75% people fail to finish them) giving you much more varied skill set. Thus if you throw a problem on an employee you're almost guaranteed they will solve it.

British managers are stupid. It has been mentioned thousand times. I got 2 degrees, on of them IT. I looked for a job a long while because everybody wanted "commercial UK experience". Thus working during my studies (in Poland) didn't count. Also some complained for level of English - in their perception it needed to be much lower as I'm a foreigner. That's the reason I can put twice as much technical documentation than my British counterparts, making 4 times less errors in the meantime. Without spell checker.

And now something totally, totally different: British doctors visited Poland to learn how to cut the queues in NHS ;). We don't have this kind of problem there, even accepting we spend 4 times less per person on health system. Go figure!

Birdie, as IT in UK is like that little birdie... DEAD.

Re: The UK skills shortage & the CBI.

Just replace 'IT' with 'engineering and anyone over the age of 40 will experience a sudden attack of deja vu.

@will code for bandwidth.

You are going to need both the chicken AND the egg so my advice is finish your course WHILE running your own business.

pay peanuts... get monkeys

Mr. Pot meet Mr. Kettle and understand that both are burned to a crisp,

No offence intended to our overseas staff however you may fail at helping our customers due to over-estimation of our customers technical capabilities... i.e. pls turn on the power :D

Your mileage may increase or your alien-nation vary!!!

Long Live amanfromMars!!!

Forever may He Live

n/t or X

That is the answer

Not the Question

looking in the wrong place

Get the hell out of London or whatever other hell hole you are working/looking for work in and look for Jobs with small companies in rural areas doing innovative things. There are plenty of us, we may not all have VC cash to spend and the wages won't be amazing, you will get experience, often in a range of things and the cost of living will be lower. Just because big business wants to fuck you up the arse doesn't mean the rest of us do.

Stop moaning

Spackers.

This is all no mystery, people!

I could tell seven years ago that IT was a totally dead field for those in the west, simply because there is no way to compete with outsourced labour. Granted, India's getting expensive; but they'll get undercut by Bangladesh or some other place where people are hungrier and the cost of living is lower.

For that reason professional IT is a fool's game. The only way to avoid the imploding-job-market trap (which, in the case of the print industry in the 1990s, caught me and wrecked an apparently good career) is to get in an industry where you CAN'T be undercut. In order for that to happen there must be (a) stringent local standards, and (b) no possibility of foreign competition. If you can get (c), an expanding future workload and (d) an elderly, retiring incumbent workforce as well, you've got a golden opportunity. THAT is worth working for!

And that is precisely why I'm going into civil engineering.

@Simon Ward et al

Thanks for your responses,

I didn't mean that i wanted to bail because I'm not learning about the current fad, its more that the course is *heavilly* java biased (with a few nods to lisp and shell scripting), and that kind of makes me a one trick pony. Even if i was very good at it, it limits my options.

I do take the point about path of least resistance. When I see entry level junior web developer position being advertised for 18k+ it is tempting to get a brain dump certificate and try to blag the interview. (speaking as someone who is on essentially min wage.) In reality, it won't prepare me for the job, and a paraphrased "sacked for being rubbish" is not something i want appearing on my C.V.

Id like to do both, as AC said, but then money becomes a worry (paying for myself @ uni and all that) although there are obviously people worse off than I am. I'll have to see how it goes, and yikes, work hard. :)

Thanks again for your responses.

Make Degrees failable

If you couldnt be garanteed some sort of qualification for paying your fees for 3 years then a degree might be worth something.

I have recently graduated, and frankly wouldnt employ anyone i graduated with. although im lucky enough to have worked in the industry for a good 5 or 6 years before i started my studies, the abilities or lack there of the majority of students i had the displeasure of working with was laughable.

Prehaps the most shocking example to me was a workplacement student employed by an ex employer of mine, who took 4 weeks to get halfway through a drag and drop flash game. who could only grasp how to use if statements (gormless look when i mentioned switch statements to him) and was completely baffled by the concept of a 'for each loop' and this was after doing 2 years of a CS Degree

The most depressing thing is that he will be graduating next year, probably with honours :-(

Really this bad?

Am i really as doomed as everyone is making out on here. What career really is secure in the current world, isn't everyone feeling the same way about their degree?

@ Dan

I took my break in employment courtesy of a cabbies stupidity. I stayed on the tools, studied. I can't even get an interview. Mention a gap in your employment history and/or serious injuries (as in my case) and your done. Don't mention it and you have a gap in your CV that they want explained......

Whilst I haven't been able to gain paid employment charitable organisations have been eager to avail themselves of my services. Unfortunately they don't consider IT an essential "core" activity (even with a PC on every desk and much business (not quite all) performed on the PC) even the one that dealt with the supply of recycled kit, hence will never consider paying for support/administration. To be fair, the poor buggers have to stretch every quid to the limit.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that I have turned my last buck in IT. As an example, the handful of positions advertised by my local council all go to folk from the flavour of the month contracting company with ads worded in such a way as to make applications from those without a close relationship with EDS/Crapita (proprietary software...) or whomever worthless.

The one interview I gained in the last couple of years saw the job go to a kid of 18 who was paid minimum wage and commuted 60 miles (round trip) by public transport each day. The last graduate opportunity I saw advertised in the area was described as "meets minimum wage".

As far as I'm concerned, I'm not surprised that there's a crisis in the IT industry. All of it down to the smeg heads running it.

Never fear though.... apparently under new regs proposed by the government I will shortly have to work full time as a volunteer for sub minimum wage on "community service" (quite likely alongside convicted perps) whilst some government appointed contracting company gets a nice bounty for placing me in such a wonderful position. Such is the bounty being discussed that were I to receive around 10 or 15% of that bounty, plus minimum wage I would be an extremely happy bunny.

CBI ? Politicians ? Pah ! A pox on all their houses.

@ Dan, Re: Not really for everyone

I disagree with you. You dont need to have a server farm at home to maintain your proficiency in IT. Actually, most of the things I have chosen to specialise in are cost prohibitive in terms of setting up a home rig and I chose them for this very reason. In any case, success in IT is not about grabbing on to the latest trend and training up for it, it's about finding a niche other people aren't covering, because it's difficult to get in to, if you do this, your skills have a better shelf life and they are more valuable, yes there is less work, but you will get paid more for it, which smoothes out the bumps.

I started out in IT in 2000 as a Windows Support person, dealing with Citrix (and by this I mean MetaFrame / Presentation Server / XenApp) primarily, it would be safe to say that I rode on the back of Citrix for about 5 years, because it was a niche product to start with, so any experience of it was good enough for an employer and then by the end, I was very good with it and as a result, much in demand. I still do a bit of Citrix now, but only really because I come across it in pretty much every environment I go in to, which means everybody has skills in it now, so consequently it's near enough worthless as a marketable skill.

If I had to start from scratch now, I wouldn't choose to study Citrix, because there are too many people that are very good with it (and too many people who claim to be good with it that can pass an interview, which is equally as threatening). As an example, of this, I have skipped the whole Cisco track, never bothered with an MCSE and I've not bothered studying for VMWare either, why? Because everybody else is playing there already, why study for the hot skills, when all it attracts is hot competition and then in a year or two you have to train for the next thing.

Paris, because she's got skills

The irony, it burns us

Yeah, fab, pump out more over-qualified people for techie jobs - you need a CS degree for systems architecture and maybe programming, not for administration and desktop support - and then refuse to hire them because they lack experience.

Meanwhile, the CBI is outsourcing all those entry-level jobs that junior techies could be using to gain that much-needed experience.

Also, pay and requirements is a joke. If I was going to take a job that required in-depth networking knowledge, systems administration and some programming (in more than one language, often), I'd want to be paid more than 20K in London. Whoever does the hiring should get real about what skills they actually require for the role, not just try and replace the poor sod who did everything by themselves for a pittance, and then got jack of it.

I've dealt with these "offshore" techies

Offshore techies are to ability what shit is to Chocolate mouse – you whip it up and it can look similar, and even fit in the same spaces, but the effect and end result are vastly different.

Some advice for people starting out

Disclaimer : I started in the internet field just when it started, so my view may be skewed. Treat with caution :)

Advice : It's all very well focussing on the technology (it's what IT is all about after all isn't it? ). No. I have been successful because of my attitude. I know this because although I am quite clever, I don't bother keeping up with all the latest techologies unless it slaps me in the face as an immediate requirement - therefore I learnt to learn quickly and be able to apply that knowledge as I'm learning it.

A 'can do' attitude is pretty rare these days, so go for that and you will build a reputation for yourself. Keep your contacts - the IT world is *very* small in real terms. Don't fuck anyone over to get to the top coz you *will* meet them again :) Don't be stingy with your knowledge, if people require help, help them and they will help you when you are stuck (very important as you can't know everything -or in my case, anything).

I recently started a contract in the City for a financial firm (usually hard roles to pick up if you haven't worked in one before). The attitude of the permies when I started was that they expected me to be a 'typical' contractor. This was an eye opener for me because I didn't know what a typical contractor was supposed to be. Suffice to say that they thought I would be a work-shy take-the-money-and-run fuckwit.

Happy to say they now treat me like any other permie. There's still the old pay difference axe-to-grind issue, but they are more accepting of it because I make a difference. If I run short of work I look for ways in which I can help the team become more efficient. Do some of the shit work (audits and process documentation) that no-one else wants to do - they'll love you for it because it means they don't have to do it. After all, for the money they're paying me I'd clean the toilets with a toothbrush. In fact I said that in the interview.

Good attitude = something not many others have = tradeable skill.

Good luck.

RE: Hard to get a job? By Mike Dyne

Totally agree.

I left school at 16 (6 years ago), got my first full-time job at 18 and was in an IT role just under three years later, and earned good money along the way.

And, surprise surprise, the most reliable way to maximize your income is to MOVE TO A DIFFERENT COMPANY, not sit around moaning about rises/inflation.

There is a perfectly good gateway industry to IT, and it is called Commercial/Transactional Printing ;)

Alternatively, this is all the advice you need;

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/07/29/the_bofh_desidoreplicator/

:D

Recruitment process to blame

I have recently been unemployed for over a year and a half despite having great knowledge of MS systems, SAN storage, Web development, virtulisation, heavy duty scale load balancing and redundancy as well as a CS Degree. Basically everything a mid to large enterprise needs from a high end sysadmin.

Yet after the job I was originally moving to fell through, no one would touch me because of the gap. When I went after sysadmin jobs they would tell me they needed an MCSE despite years of actual experience. In the end I did what the job center advised and lied about the gap and luckily I had the cash to go and do the MCSE using resources from the net. (which only took 2 weeks because I already had the knowledge).

I tried for much lower paid jobs doing web development and recruiters who didn't have a clue came out with ridiculous reasons like I did not have xhtml listed or stylesheets. It would be great if even if they don't have any technical skill that they could learn some basics like the fact that CSS is stylesheets. Then if you list both they complain that you are just listing technologies and not saying what you did with them.

I was often sent to interviews for jobs based on completely different skills than I had listed and employees were often complaining that they were sent the wrong types of people.

And employers themselves often didn't know what they wanted. A technical guy would ask some questions which if they were relevant I would do well at and then some HR person would ask things about giving a presentation or dealing with some completely unlikey conflict between imaginary collegues that you wouldn't even get involved in in the first place.

And then if you got through all that, a lot of companies despite acknowledging that I had all the skills they were after would say I was asking too much because I didn't have x qualification or because I had not worked for a while. Completely ignoring the fact that they had been impressed by y skill which was something extra that they could do with. And it would be a straight no, no negotiation or discussion about what salary would be reasonable or why.

It seems to me that recruiters/companies are being entirely too picky about skills which are irrelevant or a bonus and not picky enough (or not skilled enough to ask the right questions) about the actual technical skills. And not being prepared to take on people who need to learn or switch to a technology. (eg. an experienced programmer who transfers from Java to C# may well be a lot better within weeks than a noob who has written an app in C# already)

Luckily it ended well for me, I was offered a reasonable salary by a company who knew one of my previous employers and snapped me up as soon as they finally got my CV (It took the recruiter 2 months to decide to put me forward!) I am more than capable of doing the job and they seem as happy about it as I am.

So my advice is avoid recruiters, take a chance on someone who is smart but doesn't have quite the right skillset, if you are going to ask questions, ask about general concepts to make sure they have a good background rather than specifics about x function of y technology or 'which menu is the v option in w application'. Its tempting to use any excuse to rule someone out when you have a lot of CVs to go through, but you may well be overlooking just the person you need.

@Dan: It's time to give up

I've been programming since I was 5 (ok it was basic but we all start somewhere). I taught myself assembly language on the z80 (a ZX spectrum) when I was about 10 and a bit of 6502 when I was a teenager. Aside from some laptops, a 2nd hand IBM PS/2 and a SparcStation I've never owned a computer I didn't build myself.

I passed 4 A levels, went to uni, studied maths, taught myself C at uni, and picked up linux, shell scripting & perl in my spare time while working for £2.50/hr in a computer factory where among other things I diagnosed broken motherboards using an oscilliscope so they could be sent back to the supplier for a refund. I lucked into a better techie job working and after a few years I left it to go contracting.

That was about 10 years ago. Since then I've worked as a contractor and have years of *commercial* experience with both oracle & SQL Server as both DBA and developer, as well as unix & windows admin, networking (I've written perl scripts to auto configure cisco routers for a big ISP), C development on Unix and about 5 years of Java EE (which I also taught myself), XML, XSL, Web Services and so on as well as basic web design. I've done a bit of c# .Net, I once built a website using php and I have run maintained my own DNS, mail and web servers for several years (I picked this up working for ISPs).

Unfortunately most of these skills have been developed and used in conjunction with a popular software suite that runs on said OS, uses said databases and integrates with other systems through the use of C and Java. Which means they count for *shit all* when I apply for a job.

Because I haven't used popular suite v7 much (ok and because with a family I just can't afford to work for some of the sub 30k wages I've seen advertised) I've been unemployed for months. I don't even get called back by the agencies most of the time. The fact that I have used every version since v2 counts for nothing. The fact that I can diagnose oracle performance issues by writing queries in SQL Plus counts for nothing. The fact that I can point out that Java and Javascript aren't the same thing but I still use both counts for nothing.

The primary skill shortage in this country is in management, who are generally so clueless as to how IT systems, and particularly people, actually work that they are forced to blindly tick a list of procedural boxes in the hope that it will be enough to cover their arse in the event of a shit-fan collision. Within most organisations technical staff, however multitalented, are pigeonholed into neat little boxes, not allowed to perform functions outside of their silo and often not allowed to interact except through formal processes. An ability to learn and adapt without recourse to formal training goes largely unacknowledged, taking the initiative is frowned upon and a willingness or desire to do things outside of ones formally recognised sphere of expertise is considered dangerous.

In the past, while working for a FTSE 100 company, I have specced a server, taken delivery, fitted the extra processors and RAM, racked it, set up the network, and installed and configured the OS, database, application server, and the app itself. I doubt there is a single listed company that would *allow* a single member of staff to do that these days.

The days of my old boss 'logging on and restarting the process' to fix a problem because he'd got in before the rest of the team are long gone. These days he'd be disciplined by senior management for having his own login.

This is how "IT Best Practice" is implemented in practice when management lack the technical nous to recognise and properly exploit the talented.

What Rubbish is all of this???

The trick is... to have a brain, a personality, and sometimes, a current job helps.

When I left university a scant 3 years ago, it took me 6 months to find a temp job in IT, this was as I lacked the experience that everyone is talking about above. I have a 3rd class honours in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from a well respected university. After two weeks as a temp, I was taken on permanently, on about that quoted average for IT support tecchies. Apparently 2 weeks is enough experience if they can see you have aptitude for a job. 8 months later, they promoted me to a job that would normally require 5 years experience (not 8 months), and almost doubled that salary.

I recently got fed up, (about 2 years down the line) wanted to focus more on the systems I enjoyed, and decided to post my CV on the internet. Less than two weeks after posting my CV, I'd had a job interview with a company known and respected worldwide, and accepted their job offer. I'll be moving to a place with a lower cost of living, and maintaining the same salary I was paid when I was living on the edge of London. I will also be working exclusively on the system of my choice, the IBM iSeries/AS400/System i, whatever you want to call it (IBM don't know what to call it, thats for sure).

I was hired for my mainframe job despite in my interview saying 'I've never touched one before, and I'd never seen one before a fortnight ago', and 8 months later I was the Analyst in charge of the system. Show some skills, you'll find a job. Show a lack of aptitude, a negative attitude, or fail to know the difference between a DLT and an Ultrium backup tape at a backup administrator interview, and you wont.

Paris 'cause she could find a job in any IT department in the land....

Management

Well, if management is so crap, it'd be best to go into that instead of IT...

too many chumps floating around

I came to the UK as a backpacker, after a few months of working in bars i decided to do a bit of contracting (2004, it was £40/hr and I was 21 years old, no degree, just 2 years of intensive experience, I got that by working for FREE to get my foot in). I was lucky that the company and I got on well and they continued to contract me to different customer's sites for the next few years. I have literally travelled the world at their expense and continue to enjoy working in the UK (with inflation beating rates).

I always considered myself lucky but after working in countless IT teams with various customers all over the world & UK, I was not impressed with the level of competency from the majority of development teams here (and that includes offshore teams), in most cases there are 1 or 2 guys worth their salt but most are real numpties.

thaaank you great britain! please dont stop funding my adventures! I still have many women to meet and places to see ;-)