'IT Recruitment Should Centre On Core Skills'

Micro Focus, a provider of enterprise application management and modernisation solutions, has announced the completion of a major corporate report, ‘Safeguarding the Corporate IT Assets’. The report, which includes research findings from 450 C-Level respondents, examines IT recruitment within large organisations, clearly showing a lack of core IT skills, which could prove disastrous for the companies concerned.

The report builds on initial quantitative research conducted by Micro Focus, which showed how businesses are failing to safeguard their core business-critical technology assets. Produced in conjunction with the international business school INSEAD, the report demonstrates that, although organisations believe core systems are the most valuable to business operations during a recession, the majority continue to focus instead on the recruitment of IT skills for newer Web 2.0 technologies. Such recruitment policies not only waste valuable resources, but also fail to safeguard the future of one of the most valuable assets an organisation has at its disposal: its core IT.

In September 2008, Micro Focus polled 450 respondents across France, Germany, Italy, UK and US – 33 percent CFOs, 33 percent CIOs, and 33 percent HR directors – to discover what their organisations were doing to maintain and develop their IT systems. All companies had annual revenues of at least $100 million, with 61 percent reporting a turnover of over $1 billion. The results should serve as a wake-up call to businesses and governments alike that, even in tougher times, they must remain focused on recruiting professionals with the right skills to develop core IT assets in the future.

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In the report’s foreword, INSEAD’s Soumitra Dutta states, “This research report points to the fact that despite business leaders stating that skills to modernise core IT assets are the most valuable in a recession, global organisations are failing to plan for the essential skills required to manage and maintain these systems, which have withstood the test of time and still deliver value to the business each day.”

“While this report shows that some countries are more aware of the need to recruit core IT skills than others, overall, everyone is failing to recruit the skills needed to maintain the very heart of their business operations,” states Stephen Kelly, CEO, Micro Focus. “Core systems will provide the most value to businesses during this recession, so it is essential for decision-makers not to be distracted by newer, less critical technologies. Web 2.0 solutions have a huge potential to transform the way businesses operate, but these ‘shiny new toys’ should not be pursued at the expense of protecting and developing the IT assets at the heart of the business,” concluded Kelly.