If you troll the job board discussion groups targeted to IT professionals, you’ll see a large number of seemingly qualified, out-of-work technologists. With an unemployment rate hovering near 4.5% in the industry, how is this possible? After looking at the openings and the unemployed, I think the answer is fairly simple:
Employers are actively looking for skills, but employees want to emphasize their knowledge.
What do I mean? By “skills”, I’m talking about technology-specific things that could easily be read in a book. Being able to build a custom control in ASP.NET or being able to bend Entity Framework to create much more readable code are “skills”. Being able to determine when it is appropriate to build a custom control, or when one should choose to abandon a framework rather than continuing to bend it would be “knowledge”.
The difference is subtle, but important when dealing in technology because the skills a developer needs to write custom solutions change quite frequently, but the knowledge does not. Since this is the case, employees often want to market their knowledge and expect employers to train on skills, which is rather foolish. Employers, on the other hand, do not wish to spend resources training for skills, but incorrectly think that knowledge is unimportant (or at least not worth paying for). And so you get this strange combination of thousands of seemingly qualified IT professionals looking for jobs in a market with thousands of openings.
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