68% of classified employees in Montana’s state govt. are eligible for retirement in the next 5 years. This is the highest % in the nation. Finding, keeping tech staff will be challenge

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

It’s a quote we’ve all heard thanks to Mark Twain — though Twain credited English novelist and Parliament member Benjamin Disraeli as the quote’s originator.

The public sector probably wishes the statistics on retiring workers were lies, but the numbers paint a grimly truthful picture.

In more than 25 states, one in five employees will retire over the next five years, according to Grading the States 2005, a report from the Government Performance Project, a research program supported by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. A worst-case scenario is Tennessee — it stands to lose 40 percent of its work force in the next few years.

CIOs aren’t immune — plenty of senior IT staff and management will be ready to retire too. The usual take on this coming retirement flood is dire: State and local governments will lose valuable institutional knowledge when the only people who know how to coax data out of those old IT systems leave their jobs.

The loss of experienced staff is a concern for CIOs, but the retirement issue is only part of a larger, interwoven set of work force challenges facing government IT shops. In addition to the retirement issue are:

# a growing gap between the skills IT staff possess and the IT skills agencies need today, such as the ability to design and develop new Web-based applications;

# a surprising lack of younger workers — often due to civil service rules making the newest employees the first laid off when times get rough;

# a lack of in-house IT talent — especially at the federal level — that can take on broader responsibilities such as project or contractor management; and

# large numbers of older workers who have the skills to keep the old systems chugging, but often can’t fathom the IT needs of younger, Web-savvy citizens.

Indeed, some take a less bleak view of the number of government IT retirees, arguing instead that the institutional knowledge of legacy systems creates a mismatch of IT skills, which hinders efforts to modernize IT systems and applications. They contend that long-time staff members attempt to develop new applications using old technology, instead of adopting new Web-based approaches.

Grading the States 2005 – Montana: http://results.gpponline.org/StateOverview.aspx?relatedid=1&stateconst=STATE_MT

By Shane Peterson

Full Story: http://www.govtech.net/magazine/story.php?id=96470

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This will be a valuable conference for all involved in state IT: Fusion’05 :: Maine
where technology & government meet http://www.govtech.net/events/conference.php?confid=280

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Finding, keeping tech staff will be challenge

By Robert Weisman

High-tech talent may soon be in short supply again.

The buzz at the Society for Information Management symposium in Boston last week was about the challenges employers are facing in recruiting and retaining technology workers. With the economy picking up, baby-boomer techies getting set to retire, and college graduates flocking to other fields, these challenges are about to get tougher.

”You’re going to have a problem getting people," Leslie D. Ball, senior executive professor at Northeastern University’s College of Business Administration, bluntly warned employers. ”We’ve had a rapid decline in our MIS [management information systems] majors because of the dot-com bust, because of outsourcing, because kids no longer think they’re going to be making millions of dollars in technology."

Finding and keeping workers hasn’t been this high on the agenda for most businesses since the boom days of the 1990s, when high-tech jobs were so plentiful in such cities as Boston or San Francisco that employees could switch companies without switching car pools.

Full Story: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2005/09/18/finding_keeping_tech_staff_will_be_challenge/