Previous page: IT skills for Canada's public sector market
In the first 30 years of the IT revolution, certain industries were early adopters, and chief among them were the IT industry itself and the public sector. In fact, along with the financial services industry, the largest recruiters of IT staff would be technology companies and governments.
But now that the benefits of IT are being more widely recognized, industries outside of tech and public sectors are starting to increase the resources allocated to IT. This process is only gradually beginning to accelerate, but within a decade we expect that demand for talented IT staff will materially outstrip supply.
Calling it a crisis would be excessive, but there seems little question that, like all scarce resources, the cost of IT staff will go up even faster than it already is.
When you combine the longstanding tech-public sector habit of swapping employees with a secular global trend of greater competition for IT staff, you create the conditions for a very challenging hiring environment for the public sector. They do not want to get into a bidding war for workers, but neither can they let their employees be snapped up.
It is unacceptable for the public sector to resign itself to losing the most senior or valuable IT employees to the private sector. These employees have the critical skills and institutional knowledge and memory. Further, a continual process of employee turnover involves non-trivial hiring and training costs.
Thanks to various authors (with David Foote perhaps doing the most to popularize the phenomenon) we all know about the bulge in the population caused by the Baby Boomers, often defined as those born between 1946 and 1964.B B
There is evidence that this phenomenon will affect the public sector before the private sector because people tend to retire earlier from the public sector. Deloitte's publication, "Provinces in Transition," notes that the average retirement age in the public sector is 58.5 compared with 61.3 for the private sector.
Bye-bye boomers
According to Richard Lee, a partner in Deloitte's human capital practice in Toronto: "While the departure of the boomers doesn't specifically target public sector IT, it will of course add to the pressures on talent retention."
There are old approaches for retention of employees, but they are less successful in the 21st century. A recent (2005) study by Deloitte entitled "It's 2008: Do You Know Where Your Talent Is?" examines those legacy HR strategies and why they fail. It makes particular note of the public sector, including Canada...suggesting that we could lose a third of our public employees by 2010.
At Deloitte, we believe that the new HR paradigm for retention and acquisition is to "develop, deploy, connect." It is important for HR professionals to do more than simply throw salaries or stock options at employees.
Talented staff are (of course) motivated by money - but that is only a necessary and not sufficient condition. They also require an environment where they can learn (develop), where they end up on an optimal career path (deploy) and where they have access to the people around them (connect).
This last point is too often easily neglected: we think of IT staff as relating to technology and to machines. In reality, the biggest motivating factor for any person, even a tech geek, is the team around them. None of us exists in isolation, and it is only as part of a group that we reach our highest (and happiest) potential.
Deloitte's point of view on the differentiating value of team and cultural "connection" is particularly important for the public sector. As noted by Ian Cullwick, an Ottawa-based partner with Deloitte Consulting and a public sector human capital specialist, "government can't even begin to fight the stock option battle - but it is uniquely positioned to attract and retain employees based on a develop-deploy-connect framework".
The public sector's employment strengths and competitive advantage are already in employee education, fair and equitable treatment with defined career paths, and a broader sense of community than most private sector firms could match.B
However, the public sector needs to ensure that this employment value proposition is consistently delivered across its complex mix of departments and agencies - which is no small feat.B It also needs to ensure that this proposition is effectively branded and marketed to the right attraction segments of talent as well as to existing critical workforce segments to maximize retention.
If public sector jurisdictions don't act on this emerging challenge, the consequences for critical IT workforce segments will be dire over the next five to 10 years, as many other industry sectors and individual companies aggressively start to pursue branded connection strategies to attract and retain top talent.
Duncan Stewart is director of research: technology, media & telecommunications, and life sciences, for Deloitte Canada. He can be reached at dunstewart@deloitte.ca
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