how to drum up business with a bad study

Apparently, if you believe a Wired blogger, IT staff are woefully ignorant about their jobs and lack the skills for their daily tasks. A rather sad state of affairs, isn’t it? Well, that finding comes with a catch. It’s based on a very fast and loose survey by CompTIA, a certification shop which bills itself as a non-profit IT organization. In what seems like a rather obvious bid to drum up business, they asked IT and business managers about what they thought of their IT personnel’s skills, and predictably, found fairly dismal results. But if those results are really valid assessments, they indicate that either every company out there is barely making anything work with their subpar IT staff, and that HR and management is unable to hire a decently skilled IT person without a very rare stroke of good luck with an occasional applicant here and there or train him or her in all the new technologies they’re constantly purchasing. How else can we interpret findings as dire as the ones CompTIA produced?

In a recent report of over 500 U.S. business and IT managers conducted by CompTIA, 93 percent of respondents said there’s a gap between the skill level of their IT staff and where they want that skill level to be. Only 56 percent of respondents said the skills of the staff were “moderately close” to where they need to be. Rapidly changing technology led the list of factors that contributed to the skill gap (46%), but a lack of resources for IT skill development (43%) and ineffective training for IT staff (39%) weren’t far behind. In addition, only 15 percent of respondents said they have a formal process in place to identify IT skill gaps. Fifty-six percent said they had no process at all.

So in other words, out of ten IT employees, nine are not quite up to par but were hired anyway. Roughly a third of their bosses say they don’t train them effectively, almost half say they don’t have the money to train them, oh and most either don’t have any process to figure out whether their staff is up to par or just wing the training for the time being and worry about the effectiveness of their training later. I’d comment on the “rapid change” bits but this is a rather generic platitude you hear all the time in the IT world and if it was really such a huge factor, most companies would have their entire digital infrastructure rebuilt every year with brand new servers, apps, and computers for all employees. Since this doesn’t happen for most businesses, it doesn’t strike me as one of the factors that truly matter to the IT departments of those who offered it in the survey. Rather, it seems that those surveyed really didn’t know and reached for something that sounds convenient and businessy. And you can ask even more questions about the evaluations provided. Was the skill gap judged by what the managers wanted vs. what they received and did they take into account the limitation of their infrastructure? Do they have a good grasp on what their technical infrastructure actually looks like? Do they know the limitations?

Of course this is not to say that everyone in IT is perfect, far from it. But there’s an inherent danger in asking a manager who may not be aware of what his IT department actually does on a daily basis, or realize how often users ask for things that can’t be done or can’t be done the way they want them done due to how the company built its systems, to evaluate how knowledgeable an IT person is. This is especially problematic because the very same managers who said that their employees weren’t up to par also admitted that they can’t train them, can’t figure out what skills they’re lacking, and can’t figure out how to do either. So if they don’t even know what skills their employees need, how reliable is their judgment on whether said skills are up to par? And this is a perfect position for CompTIA because it sells certification exams and prep books for said exams. Getting any sort of certification in IT looks good on a resume, but it’s expensive and limited to a specific platform or some very abstract, general concepts in a very narrow subject area. The questions on an MSFT .NET 3.5 certification exam are the sort of stuff that your IDE will tell you when you start typing in a command. But those certifications are an easy way for managers to check off a box and a lucrative product for those who sell them, so CompTIA has a wonderful incentive to subtly pitch its product with hyperbolic numbers and general F.U.D…