Confirming — and refuting — the IT skills gap

Nearly half of American employers say they have difficulty filling jobs due to a lack of available talent, yet some people still doubt the existence of a “skills gap” in the United States. Peter Cappelli at the Wharton School says the so-called gap is really just “employer whining.” Economist Paul Krugman says the gap is an idea “that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die.”

Why do so many employers believe the gap exists, while so many other people dismiss it? Because the gap is absolutely real — and also it’s not.

At Smith Johnson Group, we help great companies find amazing IT talent. And we can say without a doubt that most of the companies we work with have indeed experienced the impact of a lack of easily available talent to fill their vital IT needs. That’s one of the biggest reasons they come to us for help, after all.

What we can also attest to, however, is that the talent is out there. And when it comes to IT, no company needs to settle for anything less than the experience and expertise it needs.

The real challenge isn’t a gap, when it comes to skills, so much as it is a gap when it comes to time and resources. It takes a lot of work and effort to find the right person for any given IT job. It also takes quite a bit of expertise in IT itself. Without the resources to do a deep search and the expertise to know what an organization actually needs, business leaders often under-hunt and over-shoot. In other words, they don’t spend enough time looking for the person they really need and end up grabbing the first IT pro that looks reasonable, even if he or she doesn’t have all the qualifications they wanted in the first place.

The other thing that sometimes happens is that business leaders become so focused on checking every conceivable box (i.e. “we need a data security guru who can program, debug code, lead our cloud migration effort, maintain our networks in peak shape — oh, and fix the espresso machine when it’s on the fritz”) that they aren’t able to recognize someone with genuine IT talent who meets their more reasonable needs and has the ability to grow into additional roles.

Either way, the result looks and feels a lot like a skills gap.

The solution? Understand your true IT needs — and be willing and able to dive deep in search for the right person to fill those needs. That, of course, isn’t something that most organizations can do for themselves.

Do you have a time and resources gap? Don’t let that turn into a skills gap. We’re here to help.