It may also be partly due to technology selection. I was talking to a commercial colleague last week, and he said that when they used a really archaic system it helped them retain staff because of the skill set, although it made it difficult to recruit new people. As we move towards more standardised approaches for desktop and applications software, I suspect we will find ourselves in a worsening situation. The South East has its own special characteristics, which could be handled by regional weighting. An external review was commissioned to carry out a comparison of IT staff salary packages against those in the wider, private and public sector IT marketplace and to make recommendations concerning package positioning and effective recruitment policies.
Immediate findings show a disturbing trend in the IT staff attrition rates.
The University is now losing staff at considerably above the national average rate and is completely failing to match this shortfall by recruiting new staff. This is at a time when staffing levels should be growing, or at least stable, in order to cope with the delivery of the new client-server systems and University applications. This, and the increase in both user demand and IT staff flexibility caused by the deployment of new systems, has resulted in the University IT Group becoming understaffed and unsettled. In order to halt a worsening situation and to build up the IT infrastructure to a full complement, management attention should be quickly directed at stabilising existing staff, initiating effective recruitment campaigns and pro-actively managing permanent and interim staff levels.