Pick skills back in demand

A few years ago Pick was being consigned to the history books. Everyone was looking for new opportunities offering cross-training to the latest trendy technology, installing C++ and Visual Basic on their PCs at home and feeling somewhat embarrassed telling people that they were a Databasic programmer when out at dinner parties. The IT world was waving goodbye to what it saw as an outdated and unfashionable system, with the effect that those people working with Pick felt they were outdated and unfashionable too, undervalued and unwanted outside the little world in which they revolved.

I remember speaking to a client who was moving away from Pick about eight years ago, and converting to an Oracle database. Similar decisions were being taken by companies up and down the country, with obvious consequences for the Pick recruitment market.

Three years later the same client was converting back from Oracle to Unidata. There were many reasons, most relating to performance and functionality, but a major contributing factor was the human resource requirement of running and developing Oracle applications. The department had tripled in size, salaries had increased substantially, contractor costs were 40% higher and the system still wasn't performing as expected.

Whilst this is a good story in itself, if not for Oracle, it also serves as an illustration of one of the ways in which the Pick world has changed in recent years. Companies like Vmark, Unidata and Pick Systems are all evolving to present technology with all the latest front-end gizmology that modern users expect, whilst still retaining the flexibility of the original data model. The Pick market is no longer contracting and demand for Databasic and SB+ programming skills is
now higher than at any time in the previous 10 years.

So what are the current trends? Well, there are two major influences affecting the UK job market:

• The recession of the late 80s and early 90s
• Current economic recovery

The recession made life difficult for those seeking work and virtually impossible for graduates and trainees looking for a programming job in Pick. Quite simply, most companies stopped taking on trainees for a four or five year period. This had a number of knock-on effects:

• There are very few candidates with less than four years experience;
• The market is top-heavy with experienced analyst/programmers;
• There is a huge number of people who sat tight throughout the recession, accepting low salary increases and lack of promotion, who are now becoming confident again and are prepared to change employers to achieve progression;
• Employers have members of staff at the analyst/programmer and senior analyst/programmer level with nowhere to promote them, but are still tied to low salary increases imposed by senior management;
• Increased workloads are the norm as companies invest in new software and development as the economy recovers.

As employers are losing their experienced people, the common scenario is that they look to recruit at a slightly lower level, i.e. a programmer with one to three years' experience and a typical salary of £18-22k. However, because there is a shortage of programmers as a result of the recession and companies not recruiting trainees, this type of person has become extremely difficult to find.

Therefore salaries for programmers at the lower end of the experience scale are being artificially inflated as employers compete for their attention. At the other end, there is a glut of candidates with six to eight years' experience, thus holding salaries low where ordinarily you would expect them to be higher.

An analysis of our candidate database tells us that the average UK salary being paid is £22,275 and the average salary required for a new position is £24,862. These figures are taken from all candidates from junior programmer level through to IT directors, but it accurately reflects the expectation that if you change employer you will get a salary increase.

Nationally, 28.5% of candidates are prepared to relocate to achieve this. Breaking "willing to relocate" down regionally produced some quite interesting results. Here is a small selection:

South East	21.6%
South Coast	17.4%
North West	31.7%
North East	7.7%
Scotland	38.4%
Wales	44.4%

The figure for the North East of England is by far the lowest, the penultimate being the South Coast region where only 17.4% of candidates were prepared to relocate. Wales was the highest but that is almost certainly due to a lack of opportunity, rather than dissatisfaction with the environment.

From these trends we can identify a number of points that will help any recruiting organisation:

• Be realistic with salaries. Offer the highest salary possible to attract candidates;
• Offer assistance with relocation;
• Don't expect to replace like with like;
• "Sell" your company and the job you have on offer to the candidate. Nurture the candidate's enthusiasm and you remain the decision maker, not the candidate;
• Act as quickly as possible on any likely candidate. Good analyst/programmers are on the job market for a very short time, two to three weeks being the average. If you sit on a CV for a week then you certainly won't be the first interview the candidate has attended;
• If you have a two or three interview selection process, try to co-ordinate it so that all interviews take place within 48 hours. Better still, have the second or third interview as a continuation of the first;
• When offering a position, ensure all paperwork is completed and issued as quickly as possible. New recruits are often lost to a competitor in the one or two week window that opens up whilst waiting for administrators to issue offer letters and contracts.

There are currently about two vacancies per candidate. We expect this situation, at best, to remain steady for the next two to three years and possibly grow to as many as three or four vacancies per candidate, depending on the performance of the economy in general and the implications of European Monetary Union. Finally, the approaching Millennium is not quite
as major an issue for Pick users as it is for our mainframe COBOL friends, but have you started your compliance testing yet?

Simon Newman
PMR Group

Last Updated: 30 June 1999

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