Information Technology Workforce Skills: The Software and IT Services Provider Perspective

The business environment continues to evolve at a dizzying pace. Advances in technology, emergence of new business practices, and shifting social and geopolitical circumstances have combined to create a ‘brave new IT world’ for organizations. This has raised a host of intriguing challenges for managers and researchers alike. This paper explores one of those challenges: acquiring skilled information technology (IT) professionals. More specifically, it examines the current and future employee skill sets desired by IT software and service provider firms. We focus on providers as a follow-up to previous studies on non-IT firms2 (Abraham et al., 2006; Zwieg et al., 2006) and because of the projected growth of these organizations as a result of increased demand for technology solutions and outsourcing. Before proceeding further, a note on the terminology used in this paper will be helpful. While it is not the intent of this paper to provide definitive meanings for the following terms, it will be beneficial to ensure that key concepts are interpreted similarly by the readers, and in accordance with the authors' intent. We define “Information Technology” (IT) as a field about the analysis, design, development, implementation, support, and management of computer-based information systems, composed of software, hardware, people, procedures, and data (Davis and Olson, 1985). Although the terms skills, capabilities, and competencies are often used interchangeably, we differentiate between them as follows. The term “skills” is defined as proficiency in a specific tool or method. It is the most basic level in a hierarchy of proficiencies. We view capabilities as the proficiency to adapt skills to broad sets of activities, and competencies as aggregates of capabilities (Abraham et al., 2006; Gallon, Stillman, & Coates, 1995). For this study, we will organize related skills into categories.