Many IT contractors already have the knowledge-centric skills that will dominate the European IT profession by 2017. The challenge facing IT contractors is to recognise and nurture their skills so they don’t become just another statistic – and to exploit the market opportunity that looks likely to arise.
That’s because analyst The Hackett Group is predicting that 770,000 corporate IT roles in Europe will disappear by 2017. Based on this assertion, not only will IT contractors need to maintain their skills just to win the best contracts, but many may also need to refocus their skills just to ensure survival.
The Hackett Group ascribes the impending job losses to the need for IT professionals with ‘knowledge-centric’ skills, and not ‘transactional’ skills. Those with ‘old’ transactional skills will fall by the wayside. As The Hackett Group’s managing director Rashpal Hullait puts it, “For many people in Europe seeking jobs in corporate IT, our research offers a bleak picture.”
But encouragingly for the UK’s IT contracting workforce, The Hackett Group goes on to forecast that by 2017, “half of all jobs will be knowledge-centric”. This presents a substantial opportunity for contractors who spot it and exploit it.
Many of the UK’s IT contractors should already have a hefty dose of knowledge-centric skills within their armoury. Because, by the sounds of how The Hackett Group describes them, knowledge-centric skills are exactly what the best contractors bring to their clients’ projects.
In a typical contract, an IT contractor might be required to “support the strategic transformation and globalisation of business services”. They may also be asked to “enable global business operations”.
Furthermore, many IT contractors work on projects in which they support their clients in “the transition from a transactional business services model to one focusing more on partnership”.
These are all projects that The Hackett Group labels as knowledge-centric.
And these are also just the sorts of projects that UK IT contractors are asked to work on all the time, and are expert at delivering. It sounds like knowledge-centric also means proactive, problem solving, can-do, commercial and delivering – all the words associated with contractors.
IT contractors will be intimately familiar with these words because it’s what they do. So, when The Hackett Group goes on to predict that there will be a shortage of IT professionals with these knowledge-centric skills, IT contractors should recognise this as an opportunity.
The outsourcing and offshoring of business services are what is driving the demise of most of the 770,000 roles still to fall out of Europe’s IT industry. But IT contractors don’t have to become unwitting victims. Knowledge-centric may just be the new buzz word to include on contractor CVs that will continue to secure an ingoing stream of lucrative contracts.