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Finding Solutions to a Fading IT Workforce

Pat Speer February 1, 2008

You’ve heard the phrase, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Can the same be said for “new dogs?” Insurers are finding that in the context of IT staff, those “new dogs” coming out of academia want less to do with the old tricks of programming legacy systems—yet the holes they are trying to fill as these “legacy workers” retire require just that.

Like most vertical markets, the insurance industry’s IT attrition issues are commonplace. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, one million IT jobs will be unfilled by 2012, chiefly because there is not enough qualified, trained human capital to fill them. In the United States, enrollment in undergraduate computer programming disciplines has declined 70% in the last five years, says Robert Horton, coordinator of the management computer systems program for the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater.


Robert Horton

“We are calling it a general IT workforce development crisis,” he says. “Largely a reaction to the setbacks associated with careers that crashed during the dot.com bust, the myths that IT careers are not ‘creative,’ and the fear that jobs are vulnerable to outsourcing, parents and counselors are advising kids not to choose computer science.”

Yet insurance companies face a unique dilemma—one that lends itself to the falling off of a specific breed of IT—those versed in legacy systems. As business demands escalate and IT teams are charged with doing more with less, decisions must be made when these knowledge workers retire. Whether a carrier decides to rip and replace its legacy systems, or find a creative way to meet those needs with existing systems, challenges ensue.

Some argue that to be progressive, IT departments need to move away from older legacy systems, and train their developers and programmers in the newer languages such as SQL, Java or C# (pronounced C-sharp). Still others are adopting an “if it ain’t broke” philosophy, choosing to hold on to systems that continue to successfully manage large volumes of data and reliably churn out complex transaction sets.

One thing is a constant: change. As IT workers trained in legacy languages, such as COBOL, depart for their second careers (away from IT) and the vendors supporting those systems create new offerings that offer less on the mainframe and more integration with newer systems, carriers are finding themselves at a crossroads.

HIGH STAKES

More than 45% of survey respondents answering a recent Insurancenetworking.com poll cited heavy reliance on IT developers who manage and maintain COBOL-based legacy applications, while 36% reported marginal reliance. Only 18% of poll respondents reported having no reliance on IT personnel with COBOL knowledge.

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