The questionnaire created by a reader of this blog, which set out to shed light on the debate about the UK IT skills shortage, has no had a significant 163 respondents.

The number of people filling in the survey hit 163 now, after a week being online. Feel free to fill it in as I will carry on checking, but I think we have a number big enough to put together some meaningful results. Thanks again Matt for you contribution to the blog.

The first figure that stands out is that over a quarter of UK IT professionals that responded (43 out of 163) do not expect to be in the IT profession five years from now.

As I have done for the previous week I yet again publish the comments of the most recent respondents. I will now beginning to blog about some of the other results.

See these blogs for some of the previous comments. IT skills survey Blog 2 – Blog 3 and Blog 4

Here are some of the latest comments:

1 – “There are fewer and fewer positions available.”

2 – “I am an IT Contractor. At least 3 contracts have been terminated due to offshoring to people with supposedly the same skill set but it becomes quickly apparent that they are not up to it. But accountants see bottom line, not quality of service.”

3 – “There won’t be many IT jobs left in the UK as they are either being off-shored or the large corporations bring in migrants on Intra Company Transfer schemes. This is not because there is a skills shortage at all, come on, can anyone really believe that? This occurs for one reason only, MONEY, its cheaper to bring in migrant workers. I didn’t work for 3 months last year, couldn’t get any work, I finally landed a job in The Netherlands, as a friend of mine also had to do. So now us UK residents have to go and work abroad because Indian people (mainly) have our jobs, and are probably paying a lot less in taxes than we would be if we were working in the UK! The large companies have members of the government in their pocket allowing them to exploit loopholes in the ICT laws, or even blatantly ignoring these laws. I know for a fact that there are migrant workers that have been working in the UK for over 2 years on ICT’s where the limit is supposed to be 18 months. And I could name the company, but I won’t here.”

4 – “Although I expect to be working in IT in 5 years time the most common problem in the UK is companies cutting costs & corners which results in sacrificing jobs in the UK & the downgrading of jobs in the UK so that salaries can remain the same, i.e. in long term pay less for a job that was paid the market norm 4 or 5 years ago which means no pay increases.”

5 – “It appears to me that there is not an IT skill shortage as such – in fact as jobs are off shored, the pool of skill in this country should become deeper – assuming people aren’t left out of employment so long they become deskilled.

The IT skills I have seen in offshored people range from competent, but inexperienced, through to non existent – the general consensus is that once you factor in the inevitable language and cultural differences, these resources may cost 1/3 as much as UK people, but you only get 1/3 of the productivity of a UK person.

In my opinion the myth of a skill shortage in IT is just that – a myth – if companies are able to replace people here with 1/3 skilled people elsewhere and still not suffer any consequences. On the other hand, those people in the UK may well be patching over the skill gap by having to work harder to keep everything afloat…”

6 – “I have had enough.”