Local Talent Drained By Foreign Poachers
The Age
Tuesday September 14, 1999
ALL over the IT industry, managers wail about the shortage of talent. They can't compete on salary; they can't find the people they need. Schools aren't turning out enough. Everyone is leaving for overseas.
It is a litany now as pervasive as the screech of Melbourne tram wheels turning a tight bend. And analysts estimate that more than 1000 young, qualified, Australian technologists leave the country every year for richer fields.
Our universities also have holes in their teaching staffs that make those institutions look like Swiss cheese.
In the short term, it is a problem bordering on the desperate. Long-term, however, and provided greater numbers of school leavers opt for IT rather than more popular (and easier) university courses, it means opportunities are literally boundless.
An honors graduate can be almost sure of getting an industry job starting at $60,000 a year, said Professor Doug Grant, head of information technology in Swinburne's computer science school.
Mr Graham Marshall, general manager of the professional and leadership development centre and multimedia at the Victorian Education Department, said the gap could be narrowed in three or four years.
``Pointing people at technology now starts at the primary level," he said. ``In secondary schools we have moved from 11 per cent of classes regularly using the Internet to 50 per cent. Both sectors are moving ahead at a great rate. A greater cohort of students is now picking IT up as a speciality."
The problems within our universities and industry are manifold. We are losing skilled people at an unprecedented rate as the US, UK and Europe, and even India, push up the bidding price for talent.
Most, if not all, Australian universities have serious shortages. Professor Grant's roll is six short, including an associate professor, lost to a mid-level university in the US where, said Professor Grant, ``I understand his nine-month salary is about double what he earned here.
``I have some prospect of filling a couple of positions from Europe," he said, ``but otherwise I will just move my problem to other Australian universities by hiring people from them and giving them the vacancies."
Professor Grant said he was able to pay over-scale salaries and in that was better off than some colleagues.
``But I cannot do that and increase my budget. I have to do the same amount of work with fewer people."
Professor Darryl Williamson, dean of Engineering and Information Technology at the Australian National University in Canberra, reported similar problems.
Both men also noted that few students in IT disciplines were now staying on to complete PhDs. They took their honors degrees and headed for the big money overseas. Professor Grant said more could be done to encourage good candidates into IT. There could still be a tendency at the secondary level to urge high achievers to the traditionally elite law and medicine, for which the rewards were frequently not now as good as they were in IT.
The image of scientists was also quite poor, closer to the mad professor in Back to the Future than to the exciting, absorbing reality.
The leakage of our best scientific and technical brains to richer and broader fields overseas is not new. Australians are prime targets because of our top-line reputation in almost every branch of technology, science and engineering, all of which depend utterly upon computers, and because we speak English. They are headhunted in the graduate schools and in our companies.
Count the Australian rules footy teams in Boston, New York, Austin, San Jose, San Francisco and San Diego and you'll get some idea of the US gaps we are filling.
Australian accents are to be heard on the campuses of Harvard, MIT, UCLA, Caltech, Berkeley and Stanford (to name but a few of the hundreds of universities interested in employing Australians). And that doesn't count the men and women in software houses or setting up their own offices in Silicon Valley - such as Dr Darren Williams, of Active Concepts in Melbourne, who, less than three years ago, was on the staff of the University of Melbourne, or Evan Thornley, of LookSmart, the Internet commerce portal.
Drop into the offices of Apple Computer or Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Macromedia, or even Microsoft and you're bound to hear someone say ``G'day".
Around the Apple campus there are Alan Silvaman, Bahman Dhara, David Baker and others, all of whom made careers here in academia, programming, systems engineering and so on, and who are now part of the enormous league of many nations drawn to the epicentre of IT development south of San Francisco.
Nor is it purely computer people who are drawn. Dr Peter Doherty, one of our seven Nobel laureates (his came in 1996 for his many years of research into brain disorders), has so far spent 25 of his 37 years in science outside the country, and he is still there, at St Jude's Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.
But science and technology are now global and, while individual Australians may bemoan the shortage, everything, eventually, is expected to find its level. At least it might if government and industry begins to address the problems.
Dr Doherty makes no apologies for having gone overseas. That was the only way he could get the support, the facilities and the money to do internationally competitive research, he said. However, winning the Nobel Prize gave him a large public voice that he was now using on his regular visits to Australia, beating the drum among governments and corporations, demanding to know why so few of them spent properly on IT and scientific research and development.
We are losing IT specialists of all kinds, most of them graduates, at an estimated 1000 a month, most to the US, but many to the UK and Europe. A few have also gone to India.
Bangalore, a hive of programming activity, had been virtually ``cleaned out", one Melbourne recruitment expert said.
Dr Bryan Gaensler, at 25 one of the world's leading astro-physicists, now working in the US, said Australian universities are not in good shape. The nation, he said, ``is at a crossroads. We must decide whether we want to be a part of the future or not.
``It is fair to say that the 21st century will be completely synonymous with science and technology and if you think the 20th century has been dominated by technological change, then you ain't seen nothing yet. Things like quantum computing, teleportation and nanotechnology, to name a few, are ideas being tested in labs all over the world today."
Government policy had to change, he said. No Australian government, of whatever political persuasion, had set high priorities on science, education or research.
There is stringent criticism of industry, too. Too few of our large corporations put enough into supporting research either within their own organisations or in universities. In the US, Europe and Japan education and research into science and technology were seen as the engines and sources of prosperity.
``It is disturbing that Australia does not yet seem to share this realisation," Dr Gaensler said.
© 1999 The Age