Companies consider outsourcing IT services due to tight human resources

2013-12-18

From：Macau Daily Times

Macau’s various industries are lamenting brain drain and underpaid practitioners, with a survey on the city’s demand for IT skill sets showing that more than half of the respondents plan to outsource their IT services. What’s more, the majority of them are from the government sector.
The Macau New Technologies Incubator Centre (Manetic), together with the Macao Polytechnic Institute (MPI) and the Macao Computer Society (MCS), conducted the survey from September to November 2013.
Email invitations were sent out to 318 participants from different organizations in Macau, including government departments (51 percent), the Public Utilities Sector and Education Institute (11 percent each), and Banking (9 percent). The remaining participants were drawn from small and medium enterprises that are most likely to have IT departments or IT professionals. The response rate for this survey reached 31 percent, with a total of 101 valid responses.
The results of the 2013 survey indicate that nearly half of operations-level employees receive MOP15,000 to MOP20,000. As for the specialist level, more than half are paid MOP25,000 to MOP35,000. Salary for management levels shows that nearly half (49 percent) draw salaries of no less than MOP35,000.
Chan Fat Man, head of MPI’s information center, pointed out that the monthly salary for a beginner in the IT industry ranges from MOP15,000 to MOP20,000. “It is similar to a croupier, but demands more professional skills. If there is no obvious difference in the pay, how can the IT industry attract people to join?”
According to the report, 46 percent of the survey’s respondents found difficulty in recruiting IT professionals in the past 12 months, which is three percent higher than last year. 17 percent of organizations replied that they had no hiring problems, while 38 percent did not engage in IT recruitment at all.
The five IT positions that are most difficult to fill and still remain unfilled are: programmer/tester, database administrator, project manager, network/ telecommunications engineer, and software engineer.
As indicated by the following graph, the IT recruitment figure for the coming year is slightly higher than last year. 63 percent of respondents plan to recruit IT professionals in the next year, one percent slightly higher than in the past 12 months.
The difficulty of hiring IT professionals may be attributed to applicants with unsuitable characteristics, or difficulties in the labor market. In this survey, 28.7 percent of respondents considered “Experience” as the major cause of difficult recruitment, followed by “Tight Labor Market” (with 25.7 percent).

Copyright@ Macau Daily Times