Put on your helmets, because according to data from Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing and outsourcing firm based in Menlo Park, Calif., hospitals are going to start hiring like it’s 1999. An article published in Information Week cites some very encouraging results from a survey the firm conducted of 1,400 CIOs, including 235 IT leaders in healthcare services.
This is what they found:
· Healthcare CIOs are among IT leaders with the most ambitious hiring plans for early next year.
· The push to implement EHRs and other clinical systems in time to reap stimulus funds in 2011 has 16 percent of healthcare CIOs planning to increase hiring in the first quarter of 2010.
· 55 percent of healthcare CIOs said they expect their organizations to invest in IT projects during the first quarter (22 percent attribute their hiring plans to the development and rollout of enterprise systems).
· Healthcare CIOs were about four times more likely to say they’ll add IT staff than the national sample of CIOs surveyed across all industries (only wholesale and retail CIOs expect more aggressive hiring in the first quarter)
· Over the last quarter, the percentage of healthcare CIOs planning to expand their IT teams jumped nearly three-fold.
· Among the top technical skill sets that surveyed healthcare CIOs say their IT organizations are seeking include network administration (75 percent); desktop support (75 percent); Windows administration (69 percent); database management (64 percent); wireless network management (56 percent); telecommunications support (52 percent); virtualization (41 percent); business intelligence/reporting services (39 percent); Web development/Web site design (38 percent); enterprise resource planning implementation (31 percent); and other (5 percent).
· Healthcare CIOs are already having a tough time finding certain skilled talent in functional areas including data/database management (17 percent); help desk/technical support (12 percent); application development (9 percent); networking (9 percent); consulting/systems administration (9 percent); security (8 percent); software development (8 percent); Web development/design (5 percent; and other (3 percent).
Wow. So if Robert Half Technology’s predictions are correct, the bonanza we’ve been hearing about is on its way. Of course there’s always a chance that these numbers are a bit inflated. But still, if I were either a CIO or an IT expert looking for work, I’d update that resume, check out the fantastic tips offered by HCI bloggers and career experts Tim Tolan and Gwen Darling, and let the bidding war begin!
