How successful is your firm at attracting and retaining people with the skills you need to develop, deploy, and maintain your applications? Do you believe we're headed for much tougher times trying to hire and retain skills or do you think some of the hype is overblown? We have fielded a survey on staffing and skills issues and I'd like to encourage you to participate as we dig into many of the issues.

General issues:

  • Do you have the most trouble attracting folks with mainframe skills, distributed technology, both or neither?
  • How does geography impact your staffing – does the fact that your are located within (or far from) a major metropolitan area make candidates more plentiful or scarce?

Technology skills:

  • Ruby, Python, or scripting languages?
  • COBOL, PL/I and Assembler?
  • PowerBuilder, VB, C, C++
  • Java / J2EE
  • C#, .Net

Softer skills:

  • Project management
  • Testing skills
  • Leadership
  • Writing skills
  • Interpersonal skills

We're assessing current staffing / skills issues, anticipated issues including the anticipated impact of Baby Boomer retirement on staffing and skills in the coming years.

If you'd like to share your experiences through the survey vehicle, I'm happy to share the results as recompense for your time.

See the survey at http://deploy.ztelligence.com/start/index.jsp?PIN=15WBQ6P93ZTZN