The people I speak with about virtualization projects always list the same reasons for going virtual; they don’t have enough space in their data center to add more physical servers, they can’t afford power and cooling bills, they want to consolidate physical machines, and they want to consolidate physical people.

That’s right; the majority of people I speak with - employers and employees alike - say nonchalantly that they deploy virtual machines to avoid deploying more IT staff. While this is great for corporations, it doesn’t sound so good for IT job seekers.

A few examples; I went to a VMware Inc. User Group meeting in Boston on March 27, and one user gave a presentation about the virtualization project he oversaw at the paper manufacturing company called SAPPi in Maine.

“One reason we wanted to virtualize is we needed to lower our IT headcount. We needed to get rid of high end support and just keep desktop support,” the systems engineer/presenter said.

Similarly, at the growing law firm Owen Bird Law Corp. in Vancouver, British Columbia, Stephen Bakerman, the sole IT staffer, went with Virtual Iron virtualization to avoid adding more physical servers and having to hire more staff to help him manage it all.

“The cost savings is probably $100,000, and the time savings for me are incredible. Once everything is virtualized, I can run everything from my desktop remotely from my office or at home. I don’t have to hire someone else, and I would have if we kept adding servers,” Bakerman said.

Another company called QualComm Inc virtualized 60% of its data center environment and saw a similar side effect. At the VMware Virtualization Seminar Series in Providence, RI Feb 26, VMware presented a case study of the wireless technology company showing how it started with 1,200 servers and consolidated down to 100 (12:1 ratio) physical servers, increasing data center space and cutting back on power and cooling. That’s great. And the cherry on top? They have not had to increase their IT staff at all in 2.5 years.

Sure, I get how cool virtualization is, and the benefits it brings from a savings and management stand-point, but is anyone else concerned those IT college kids who dream of days spent engineering systems won’t be able to find a job? or is anyone worried about those system administrators who might get consolidated from many to few along with their servers?

I’m interested in hearing from IT folks; is virtualization leading to a virtual job market?

In a trend reversal that first emerged in late 2000, salaries for noncertified IT workers now average more than pay for workers with IT certifications, according to Foote Partners’ quarterly IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index, which monitors salaries of 74,000 IT professionals in the U.S. and Canada.

“The corner has officially been turned for IT professionals who choose to market the diversity of their talents, not just their technical skills,” said the 23-page report by Foote Partners, a Vero Beach, Fla.-based IT workforce research firm.

“IT jobs have changed substantially in eight years. In another few decades, the IT organization as we know it today will be hard to find, and so will entire segments of IT jobs. The hurt that has been put on the marketplace reputation of skill certifications is only a drop in the pond of fundamental changes that will reform or destroy dozens of long-held IT industry conventions, beliefs and rituals,” said the firm’s co-founder, CEO and Chief Research Officer David Foote in a statement.

On a more extreme note, I recently wrote about an analyst who said IT department jobs may one day be obsolete because users are becoming more self-reliant.

While I don’t agree with this prediction, it is clear that the scope of IT careers is changing. It seems the biggest issue now is whether students who earn degrees in computer science are learning skills that translate into real-world data center jobs.

For instance, 29-year-old Aaron Sawchuk, CTO of Marlborough, Mass.-based ColoSpace explained how he went to Middlebury College in Vermont with the intention of earning a degree in computer science but switched his major to economics because his studies didn’t pertain to relevant technologies. The IT skills he needed to found ColoSpace he learned on his own.

According to a report from the American Electronics Association (AeA), 118,500 jobs were added to the U.S. high-tech industry between January and June of 2007, bringing the total to 5.94 million jobs. Even so, there is a clear shortage of skilled IT workers to fill those openings.

I am interested in hearing from IT staffers about computer science education. Are today’s college courses relevant to the technologies actually used in today’s data center, or did you feel like a deer in the headlights at your first data center job? If you didn’t go to school to learn your trade, how did you learn? What advice would you give a young person considering a career in IT? Leave a comment here, or send me an email.

I recently wrote a story about the state of high-tech jobs, which was based on a study by the high-tech industry lobbying group AeA. In this article, questions about how to advance the high-tech job market (in effect, the high-tech industry) were raised. Some experts argue that there is a skills shortage and that is at least one of the reasons the U.S. high-tech industry isn’t as good as it could be. SearchDataCenter.com readers were kind enough to send us some feedback about this article and share their insights. As always, let us know what you think by commenting on this blog, or send me an email to have your say.

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I liked your article but you should make clear the bias of your sources. The title makes it sound like there is a high tech skills shortage, which is a canard circulated by lobbying groups such as the AeA. The AeA mission statement says they are dedicated to the bottom line of their member companies, not to any kind of truth in journalism. Take your pick.The reality is: there is only a shortage of skilled workers willing to work long hours for peanuts and no benefits. There are millions of highly trained workers who will gladly work for a middle class salary and benefits.

You could improve your reporting by saying something like “Lobbying group claims skilled worker shortage” and possibly explain to your readers that although studies have shown there is no skilled worker shortage, hi-tech employers would like to replace their expensive American workers with cheaper foreign workers.

Sincerely,

J.M.

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Adam, please take a quick look at this blog, BLS-OES and NSF educational data — easy read about 1 1/2 pages.Post: Myth: Labor Shortage in Computer and Math

Link: http://immigration-weaver.blogspot.com/2007/10/myth-labor-shortage-in-computer-and.html

Regards,

S.K.

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A.’Archey believes that, at least for the moment, authorizing more non-citizens to fill high-tech positions would be a step in the right direction. “Policy makers currently need to reform U.S. high-skilled visa policy. We should be attracting, not shunning, the best and brightest talent from around the world, either through temporary H-1B visas or permanent employment-based green cards. Instead, the United States places arbitrary caps on H-1Bs and imposes a time-consuming, bureaucratic process on obtaining green cards.”‘

We have been saying that for 40 years now. At some point you have to realize that giving a heroin addict more heroin is not a reasonable stopgap solution.

B.

The implication that the H-1B program attracts “the best and brightest\talent from around the world” is laughable: http://www.cis.org/articles/2007/back407.html.

The data for Green cards is not much better. Still to be published.

jmm

IBM and Missouri State University are teaming up to create a new college IT curriculum: Bachelor of Science in IT Service Management. The new degree program in the Department of Computer Information Systems (CIS) is the school’s attempt to bring real-world relevance to its CIS program.

According to Professor Ron Dattero from Missouri State, MSU had over 1,000 students enrolled in the CIS around Y2K. But in recent years, enrollment dropped to 300. Dattero said the school had to do something, so it turned to Big Blue to revamp its program to make it more attractive to job seekers.

Traditional CIS curricula focus on coding, database analysis, mathematics and engineering — but oftentimes these skill sets don’t translate to the job market. Skills like project management, software distribution, and fault management are more aligned with what the industry is looking for.

Paul Kontogiorgis, IT Services Curriculum Program Director at IBM helped MSU build its new curriculum around IT services. He said that academia has not had an introduction to the real business of IT since the early 1990s.

“Academia and industry have not collaborated on common interests,” Kontogiorgis said. “Businesses go to research facilities to make quick money, but have done little on preparing the future for academia. Academics have limited industry experience.”

This new program from IBM and MSU attempts to bridge that gap and bring new relevant coursework to CIS students. According to Kontogiorgis and Dattero, the hottest skills are: Fault or problem management (monitoring network, storage, server platforms and applications), IT project management and change management.

Dattero is also working to bring ITIL certification into the curriculum. The effort is still under negotiation, but Dattero is working on getting university stakeholders to help fund ITIL and certification and examinations.

Traditionally, companies pay for their employees to spend three days (20 hours) cramming in an ITIL foundation course from a third party testing firm. But students at MSU could have the luxury of a whole semester (45 hours) to study ITIL and according to Dattero, walk away with a better depth of understanding of ITIL service management principles.

“The number of professionals certified in ITIL is really going up,” Dattero said. “We need to have pros coming out of the schools, rather than companies trying to produce people with service management foundations.”

Are traditional CIS programs relevant? Should companies be doing professional development (like ITIL certification) or should that be a college level requirement? Which university has the best IT management program in the US? Leave me your feedback in the comments section.

Gene Kim, founder and CTO of Tripwire, Inc. and co-founder of the IT Process Institute, answers questions about what he believes are the most valuable skills in the data center job market.

Can the mainframe still drive a career?

Kim: Holy cow, yes! One of the best IT practitioners I know recently made the observation that his mainframes which had been providing him the most reliable and stable service were suddenly causing him the worst problems. When he started looking into why, he discovered that most of the experienced mainframe administrators had retired, and that the mainframes were now being administered by staff who had managed Microsoft Windows systems. As a result, the mainframes were treated like just another Windows workstation, to the extent that problems were being resolved by rebooting.

Many critical applications still run just fine on mainframes. We need people who are not only technically savvy, but who fully appreciate the consequences of what can go wrong in a complex and mission-critical systems.

What would you consider an emerging data center skill set?

Kim: I wish someone had told me ten years ago to spend two years working in internal or external auditing. 50% of the leaders of high performing IT organizations that I’ve studied have come from an audit background. It’s because auditors gain mastery over the most complex business processes in an organization, such as revenue to cash and supply chain processes.

Most IT folks never see these processes, yet these are transactions that must be processed reliably and correctly, or the business comes to a complete halt. Anyone who spends time working in these processes can’t help but gain an appreciation of how businesses run, and see how IT often makes them all tick.

I can’t seem to get myself excited about IT processes and controls. From a professional development perspective, why should I pay attention?

Kim: I used to say the same thing. Processes and controls — how boring! That is, until I started researching the differences between exceptional and mediocre IT organizations. What differentiates the best performers from all the others has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with processes and controls.

For example, according to a 2005 IT Process Institute survey, IT organizations with effective controls and processes are able to implement 8 times more projects; deliver and support 4.5 times more IT services to the business; support 6.6 times more applications and software; have 5.4 times higher server/sysadmin ratios; and authorize and perform 14 times more changes.

Individuals who can help guide the organization to figure out how to make processes and controls work for them to achieve business goals will be the leaders of tomorrow. Unlike technology trends that come and go like yesterday’s fashion, practitioners can build a career based on the certain universal truths about IT processes and controls that are sustainable. Black belt process practitioners will have the most exciting career opportunities ahead of them.