Where's the techie?

Westchester County Business Journal, Jan 01, 2007

Businesses nationwide are expected to increase spending on information technology and hire more professionals in the new year. Yet many college students remain reluctant to pursue IT careers, convinced that the jobs they would hold will eventually be outsourced overseas.

Now, Pace University and a Manhattan tracker of IT employment data hope to show these students and others that employment prospects are brighter than they think. Pace and SkillPROOF Inc., formerly based in Yonkers, have created a new quarterly index intended to measure demand for IT specialists by major employers in Westchester as well as Manhattan.

In Westchester, the Pace SkillPROOF Information Technology Index for the third quarter of 2006 showed a 43 percent jump in IT jobs compared with the yearago quarter - reflected in a climb in the index score from 61 to 104. A fourth-quarter index will be released this month.

"Our purpose was really to better inform families of our students, our students, the general public that IT jobs are strong are well," said Susan Merritt, dean of Pace University's Ivan G. Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems.

Drawing more students to IT jobs has become a mission for Merritt and Pace. During the live years ending last year, enrollment in the computer sciences school dipped 30 percent from its all-thne high in 2001, to the current 1,400 students.

Pace was not alone; nationwide, interest by freshmen in majoring in IT fell 70 percent from the end of the dotcom boom in 2000 through 2005, according to a survey released in February by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles.

And while the computer school's enrollment is expected to show its first increase in five years with the incoming fall class, Merritt says that won't lessen Pace's effort to encourage students to pursue IT careers.

Henning Seip, president of SkillPROOF, said his company scans Internet job listings posted for IT jobs in Manhattan and Westchester by corporate giants, then, sorts the jobs into 11 categories. The index assigns a mathematical weight to each job category intended to reflect the proportion of job openings compared with 2004 and 2005, the first two years for which SkillPROOF began collecting information.

"The fact is, large corporations that are typically blamed for doing offshore outsourcing actually have a record number of job openings, especially here in the New York City area. That's basically what we want to make public," Seip said.

The growth in IT hiring shown by the index reflects an expectation that businesses will spend more on computer services and systems. A survey released in December by Forrester Research Inc. predicted businesses will spend 6 percent more on IT - less than the 8 percent jump of 2006, but more than what had been predicted this time a year ago.

A growing number of IT companies are assigning jobs to domestic companies, That should step up this year, in part bemuse many companies will scramble to upgrade or replace their computers, to accommodate Microsofts new Vista operating system, said Christopher Furey, chief executive officer of Another 9 L.L.C. in Tarrytown.

"Depending on how likely corporate America is to open up the wallets for the first time in seven years, since Y2K, we may be on the verge of the first forklift upgrade that the U.S. IT economy has seen since Windows 95," Furey said. "That's going to be an outsource job if ever I've seen one."

Another 9 is a New York provider of managed computer services that acquired Furey's Savvy Networks USA earlier this year, creating a larger business focused on enhancing IT system availability or "up-time" for smaller businesses.

Furey said Another 9 will add 10 to 15 new staffers this year to its work force of 25 professionals, and is expanding its facilities at The Landmark at Eastview.