With Competition For IT Techs Rising, Can IT Solutions Providers Fill Void For Campuses?
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
The need for qualified IT techs is on the rise nationwide, but colleges and universities will have a harder time filling their open positions in 2015, due to a shortage of talented applicants.
According to this article from Campus Technology, campus information technology departments are looking for candidates with skill sets in areas such as mobile and Big Data, but they will be competing with corporations for top talent. Smaller institutions with tighter budgets will be hardest hit, having a hard time luring top candidates away from the more lucrative salaries in the private sector.
In its 2015 Salary Guide, IT staffing firm Modis reported that IT salaries will jump almost 5 percent overall, but high-demand jobs that require complex analytical or enterprise architect skills will increase between 10 and 12 percent, meaning that budget-strapped institutions will find it difficult to compete with corporate salaries.
Deborah Scott, chief information officer at Worchester Polytechnic Institute, in Massachusetts, told Campus Technology that the IT hiring crunch is already making itself felt. “I’m finding that IT professionals are in really high demand across all industries, and it seems to be from Boston all the way through Central Massachusetts. I have even heard that there is negative unemployment for IT professionals, meaning that there are more open IT positions than there are IT professionals to fill them. We are finding that we are having a hard time recruiting because of that.”
In addition, as higher education focuses on meeting the need for more graduates with specialized IT skills, such as data analytics, cybersecurity, and robotics, campuses themselves have greater need for IT infrastructure and solutions to train students in these programs.
Scott explained that at least half of her IT department’s responsibilities deal with centralized IT, which is a service that could easily be outsourced.
Scott said, "About half of my division deals with the IT infrastructure and back-end computing. The other half deals with directly supporting the delivery of the academic mission — whether that is supporting the faculty, the students doing research or in the teaching in the classroom or online learning space."
By offering basic, centralized IT functions, or even developing more specialized, higher-level IT skills in a comprehensive educational package, IT solutions providers could find there are opportunities on educational campuses.