The IT job market is usually a seller’s market, even in tough times
like these. But some IT roles are especially difficult to fill. Here are
10 jobs that typically send companies into fits when they need to hire
for them.
1: IT trainer
IT trainers play a unique role in the IT world, and they need a
unique skill set. By itself, this position would be hard enough to fill.
But add the fact that being a trainer differs in many ways from the
typical IT job, along with the frequent need for travel, and you have a
recipe for “tough hire.”
2: Project manager
The biggest problem in hiring project managers is usually self-imposed: the “requirement” of a PMP certification.
Why does that make it hard to hire? It isn’t just that folks with PMP
certification are expensive and tough to find. It’s the difficulty of
obtaining the certification in the first place. The certification has a
“chicken and egg” logic to it: To earn it, you need to be managing
projects… but it can be hard to get project management work without the
cert. As a result, the talent pool is artificially small, and many
otherwise well-qualified candidates get filtered out.
3: CIO/CTO/director of IT/etc.
IT leadership roles are extremely difficult to fill. Like IT
trainers, leadership positions require the candidates to have skills
that just are not learned in the typical IT job. Companies are forced to
hire good leaders with weak (or nonexistent) technical knowledge or to
hope that a technical person can learn the leadership and business
skills required to be a success. It is difficult to find someone who has
good “crossover” skills and whom you feel comfortable with, making leadership positions hard to fill.
4: Help desk staff
The basic problem with filling help desk jobs is that they usually
pay far less than the person you really want to hire will accept. Plenty
of people can do a perfectly fine job with the help desk position,
despite the technical skills required and its challenges for workers
(the stress of metrics they have little control over, like “average time
to answer calls” and ticket closure rates, dealing with angry people
over a phone, etc.). But how many of them are actually going to work for
what the help desk job pays?
Most companies see the help desk as a necessary evil, a cost center
to be contained. And in a way, they are right. With razor thin margins
in many industries, the cost of support can make or break the
profitability of a company. So it is natural for them to squeeze the
salaries as hard as they can. But for managers looking for
well-qualified workers, those tight budgets make it impossible to get
the right help, unless they find a diamond in the rough or someone with a
tough job situation.
5: Specialized programmer
Device drivers, operating systems, and mobile applications: Any idea
what they have in common? The developers who know how to write those
kinds of software and do a good job of it are exceedingly rare — or
there is a high demand for a relatively small number of developers. Some
of these positions are just so specialized that only a handful of
developers are doing it. Others (like mobile applications) have lots of
developers out there, but the demand is just so high that the companies
looking to make a hire have positions unfilled for months at a time.
Read the next 5 @ Techrepublic.com
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