Despite the global down turn of the IT industry in 2001-2002, our comparative research shows that in all of the study countries, IT industries are doing well and are growing at a strong rate.
In all of the study countries, IT labour shortages have traditionally been handled through immigration. In the US, and increasingly in the other study countries, IT work is being sent off-shore to countries such as India and China. These may only be short-term solutions to a problem that requires more creative training and retraining strategies. Needed are strategies that promote the life-long learning necessary for IT occupations. Such strategies must also promote cross-training because multiple skill sets are increasingly necessary in IT.
We found that in all of our study countries, IT is a young, but not entirely young, occupational group and contrary to what one might expect, it is getting older. It is important that the industry recognizes and this and ensures that human resource policies are adjusted accordingly. For instance, one large IT company in Canada has a policy that appears age neutral because it uses the number of years that an employee has been with a company to set up a performance reward scale. Its effect is that older workers are required to work more hours than younger workers to achieve the same score on a performance scale. Policies such as this will likely push older workers out of IT, and inadvertently, reduce the human capital in IT firms.
Our research shows that, with the exception of Australia, the proportion of women working in IT occupations in the study countries declined over the last decade. This is surprising, especially in light of the fact that each of the study countries introduced educational programs throughout the 1980s and 1990s to encourage girls and women to pursue science and technology training. This is a trend that needs to be monitored and strategies need to be developed to recruit and retain women in IT jobs.
Canada stands out as having a high trade deficit in IT products. This, in combination with Canada's relatively low public investments in IT R&D and high failure rates of IT start ups, suggests that policy should focus on making IT business more viable in Canada. Policy initiatives have almost universally provided capital investment for manufacturing processes but have neglected human capital investment. Yet, for IT-related economic development policies to succeed, they must factor in ever-increasing requirements for human capital in the labour force.
