Matching the demand for and supply of IT professionals: towards a learning organization

Abstract

This article presents a study among information technology (IT) companies and young IT professionals, which demonstrates the central role of career development and strategic training policies in improving the match between demand for and supply of IT professionals. These policies seem to be able to support both the changing demands for qualifications of IT professionals and the growth needs of these specialists. The changing demands concern, amongst others, the ability to deal with information technology, business processes and business strategy issues in an integral way. Actually, however, most IT companies mainly focus on solving, in the short term, their demand for human resources in a quantitative sense. It is argued that addressing the qualitative problem by means of a strategic training policy, will, in the long term, also solve the quantitative side of the match. This training policy, which stresses the learning processes of young IT professionals and “learning from each other”, is related to the concept of the “learning organization”.