Increasing Global demand for IT professionals!

Embedded here is the copy of the presentation I made last week at the NPA conference- for fellow recruiters from the Asia Pac region.

The purpose was simple- it was essentially to highlight to the folks in my ilk-that contrary to the perception that global meltdown would force companies to tighten budgets, and despite the massive flood of layoffs and pink slips all around us-there is a lot of demand for IT professionals in future too -and more so, in the Asia Pac region!! And we must gear up by transforming the way we recruiters must function !!

The basis of my hypothesis?

1. IT industry has been evolving over the last few decades-and is now at a stage -thanks to globalisation, where companies have to strategically invest in IT-to stay relevant and exist!!

2.Historically, US was the hot bed of all the action. However the declining trend of American students pursuing STEM ( science, technology, engineering and mathematics) streams of career, particularly in the last 2 decades-has seen US sliding from the most preferred R&D destination to the seventeeth of the present top 30 destinations worldwide.

The above, coupled with the fact that there is an increasing trend in foreign students-are returning to their native lands-( the 65000 cap on the H1-B visas hasn't helped either!)- is driving the emergence of more R&D centres across the world.

3. Interestingly there have been a lot of countries in the Asia Pac ( 4 of them now stormed the top 10 IT industry competitiveness) -who have been very proactive in creating a sound environment for the encouragment of technology.

Yes, the future is bright. However, the nature of jobs that would be demanded would be significantly different from just the pure 'coding' or 'techie' guys. My guess is that there would be a strong need for 'business intelligence' , -read service-oriented architecture??

One thing is for sure though..there is an increasing need for global migration of professionals -and hence, a lot of challenges for the recruiters worldwide.

Recruiters would need to look beyond transactions, and build relationships with candidates! One can already see the reduction in the average tenure of people being employed with each employer. I see a strong shift in loyalties -meaning, the onus on training will now be on the 'orange employee' to keep him/herself upgraded as companies are anyway laying off !!

Recruiters would perhaps need to collaborate with other recruiters-across the different regions -to be able to add value better -to their clients and candidates!!??

HR managers of companies would perhaps need to look at partnering with recruiters- as against managing 'vendors' presently?!! Say, Supply chain management-instead of just 'sourcing'!?

What do you think? Am I missing any points??