Wanted: IT Staff with Diverse Skills

By Todd Wasserman

IT certifications earned by workers with specialized skills working with different technologies or platforms may not have been a perfect screening criterion for a new employee in the past, but they usually ended up with the same result: a higher salary for the employee.

That trend, however, came to an end this year according to a new study by Foote Partners of Vero Beach, Fla. The survey of 74,000 IT professionals at 1,900 organizations in the U.S. and Canada found that, for the first time since 2000, workers with non-certified IT skills had higher salaries than those with certified skills.

Why? The simple explanation is that employers now value real-world problem solving abilities over skills that are learned in a more academic setting.

"More and more people are looking for people with good, strong, sound experience," says Diane Morello, vice president and fellow at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn. "That they may have certification is great, but certification is not where people are going to look initially, except for a very few technical areas, like security."

David Foote, co-founder, CEO and chief research officer of Foote Partners, says employers are now looking for non-technical skills such as a knowledge of the company's business and "even things like ethics in some cases" rather than, say, a certification in JavaBeans/EJB or Visual C++.

Leading a team may trounce technology schooling
In other words, the ideal candidate in many cases is someone who's not only steeped in technology, but who can lead a team, work well with others and visualize solutions for the company that may even go outside the realm of IT.

"There's an increasing awareness from CIOs that it's great to be a techie, but even better to balance that from a business perspective," says Stephen Elliot, research director at IDC of Framingham, Mass.

For CIOs, finding such a candidate can be tricky for the following reasons:

• Job titles are misleading and irrelevant "More work that people are asked to do is situational rather than a predictable set of what a job description expects," says Morello. "And in keeping with that, most of the job descriptions we've seen are quite traditional, tethered to practices from 30 to 40 years ago." In fact, a recent Foote survey found that 52% of respondents think their job description doesn't match what they actually do.
• IT has matured "People have raised the bar for what's expected within the world of IT," Morello says. Foote says the more widespread use of UNIX in the mid-1990s ushered in a new era where employers began to expect more of their IT workers than just technical skills. "It was so out of control back then that they were lumping in UNIX systems administrators with MVS [Multiple Virtual System, a programming language for mainframes]," says Foote. "They were like 'What's the difference?'" Foote says the HR departments didn't keep up with the changes.

Yet, despite such shifts over the last 15 years or so, searching for candidates by title is still the norm. To remedy this, analysts suggest a few options:

• Deconstruct a job title to determine what's valuable about it and then seek candidates with a collection of skills that fit the profile. Foote acknowledges that de-emphasizing titles is somewhat controversial in the IT world. "IT people are very title-oriented because they know titles are everything when it comes to new jobs," he says. "If SAP is hot and you don't have SAP in your title, you're not going to look that great when you're out there looking for a job."
• Seek candidates with specific industry knowledge "People are looking for experience," says Foote. "They want an Oracle database administrator who has worked in the healthcare industry for five years and knows patient reference systems."
• Incorporate skills premiums in base pay Instead of going by a title like "administrator" or "programmer," break down the particulars of the job (like knowledge of Linux, UNIX, .Net or SAP) and adjust the base pay to accommodate these skills. Such premiums can also be used as a de facto retention bonus.
• Take into account the cultural fit IDC's Elliot says while pay is obviously an important part of the package, the workplace culture is "something that pay doesn't dictate or drive."

After all, a comfortable workplace can go a long way towards nabbing the prized IT employee who also possesses some business sense.

"It's great to be able to speak in bits and bytes," says Elliot, "but the ability to translate that into business impact is a tougher skill set and highly sought after. People who can do that can write their own ticket."

Todd Wasserman has more than 15 years' experience writing for The New York Times, The Industry Standard and Business 2.0, among other publications. He is currently editor of Brandweek magazine.