Following yesterday’s report detailing a large number of shortage skills in New Zealand, today we’re focusing on IT Skills. The Department of Labour has surveyed 16 major IT recruitment agencies to discover which IT vacancies were easiest to fill and which were most difficult.

The survey revealed New Zealand’s employers face growing difficulties in recruiting IT staff. 74 skill-sets, (out of 140 analyzed), were found to be in shortage - an increase from 55 in 2004 and 13 in 2003. To be in shortage at least half the recruiters need to find it difficult or very difficult to find suitable candidates with a particular skill.

The Department found the most severe shortages were in J2EE, data warehousing applications, Java, business analysis and CCNE.

In general, recruitment of staff was hardest in network engineering, application development, framework development, and process and systems management.

Least difficulty was found in telecommunications and multimedia IT.

The Ten IT Skills Hardest to Recruit

The percentages in specific examples below indicate the number of recruiters who found the skill difficult or very difficult to fill. Only shortage skills are shown.

Databases Skills in shortage:
Data warehousing (94%), Oracle (81%), Sybase SQL Server (75%), MS SQL Server (69%), DB2 (50%).

Application Development Skills in shortage:
Java (94%), Visual Basic.net (88%), C#.net (87%), Visual C++ (76%), C++ (75%), PL/SQL (69%), Oracle Forms (62%), Embedded C (57%).

Application Design Skills in shortage:
UML (88%), Rational Rose (87%) and Testing Driven Development NUnit (56%).

Web Development Skills in shortage:
ASP.net (87%), Advanced Web Design (50%), ASP (50%), XML (50%).

Media Development Skills in shortage:
None.

The full report can be read here. (Opens pdf file in new window.)