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High-Tech Workers in High Demand

As they passed under the brick archways of the University of Virginia campus toward their graduation ceremonies last month, some of Cynthia Peng's classmates had no idea what jobs might await them.

That was not Peng's problem, however. Long before the snow and ice had disappeared from the campus courtyards in Charlottesville this spring, Peng had made her choice from among several tempting employment offers.

She and three dozen other newly minted U-Va. computer science graduates have been snapped up by high-tech companies, including several in the Washington area, at annual starting salaries ranging from $47,000 to $32,000, said Jane Prey, one of Peng's professors. Peng is headed for a software development position at BDM International Inc., the government contractor based in McLean, not far from her Fairfax home.

Peng and the others are among the beneficiaries of a soaring demand for computer programmers and systems analysts, network technicians and other specialists whose skills are critical to the success of high-tech companies in the Washington region and across the country.

"It's the old issue of supply and demand," said Mark S. Hartung, manager of human resources at QuesTech Inc., an electronic warfare systems company in Falls Church. "There's a much greater demand, primarily for the programmers, and there's not a great supply of them."

Aggravating the skilled high-tech worker shortage is the fast growth of technological innovation, which has led to a bidding war among employers for experts with the latest software and computer systems know-how. Those with up-to-the-minute skills can almost name their price. Those without such skills often return to school to protect their jobs by retooling.

"There just doesn't seem to be enough people out there doing these things," said Charlie Brown, vice president of Comsys Technology Services Inc., a nationwide computer consulting services firm with a Rockville office supplies 550 computer programmers to area firms straining to automate their operations and upgrade computer networks.

Washington area companies are finding that they must be creative in tapping into pools of these workers, including using Internet-based hiring services to search for recruits across the United States, in India, some former Soviet states and other sources of high-quality foreign technicians.

Computer-related jobs are the fastest-growing occupation in the region, according to employment analysts. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that from 1994 to 2005, computer-related employment will jump by an estimated 60 percent nationwide, with the demand at least as strong in this region.

Details on recent job growth in these fields for the entire Washington metropolitan area are not available, but in the District, where private sector employment grew by less than 1 percent over the past year and the number of government jobs continued to decline, employment of computer and data-processing specialists in the service sector rose by 7 percent from March 1995 to March 1996.

In Virginia, the state employment commission said job prospects for college graduates are the best in six years because the economy is doing well. The jobs that are most in demand are in computer-related specialties, engineering and technical areas.

The surge in high-tech jobs means a seedbed of trained professionals to further feed high-tech growth, experts said. But the hiring of high-tech specialists is often knocked off-kilter by the constant changes in technology that can make a worker's principal expertise out-of-date almost overnight.

Software producers such as Microsoft Corp., Novell Inc., Lotus Development Corp., Intuit Inc. and Oracle Corp. are constantly revising their programs used to build networks, automate business operations, handle office record keeping and create software, and many employers are demanding that the programmers they hire have mastered new wrinkles.

"The shortage is primarily because people don't have the skills companies need at this time," said Fred J. Ricci, program director for electrical engineering at the Northern Virginia Graduate Center in Falls Church, the classes of which are filled with experienced computer specialists seeking to upgrade their skills.

"The demand is growing as companies shift to new technologies and the applicant pool isn't able to keep up," said Kathy Spry, an account manager for the Lendman Group in Virginia Beach, which runs hiring fairs that attract more than 50 companies, including several to be held this week in the Washington area.

The number of broader-gauged computer engineers, systems analysts and scientists is projected to double over the next decade, from 778,500 to 1.5 million nationwide, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, the number of programmers, whose skills typically are more likely narrowly focused, is expected to track overall job growth, from 510,700 in 1994 to 543,000 in 2005, the bureau said.

If enough of the right matches don't occur, worker shortages could develop that could slow the growth of some Washington area technology companies, experts said. "It could get to that point," Hartung said. "Is it at that point? I don't think so. We've lost some revenue as a result [of programmer shortages]. How much, I don't know."

The mismatch of skills and needs has led to a ferocious competition for the most qualified computer specialists, with companies are raiding one another's top performers. Signing bonuses of $2,000 to $3,000 for programmers "are becoming more and more prevalent," said Jim Hollister, director of employment for Computer Data Systems Inc., a Rockville high-tech contractor. Some companies also pay smaller sums to their own employees who offer hiring leads.

The competition for workers is boosting salaries for the fortunate ones, Hollister said. Brown's company is hiring programmers with several years of experience and expertise in C++, the hot programming language, for $45,000 to $75,000 a year. Database designers and administrators who can handle Oracle software products were earning annual salaries of $50,000 to $60,000 several years ago, Hollister said. Now, the best can demand $80,000 a year, he said.

There is a definite downside to the competition, said Ben Acton, who teaches telecommunications networking at Montgomery College's Germantown campus. "It leads to tremendous instability in the work force," he said, adding that many programmers keep one eye on their current job and the other on the next one.

"There is a lot of job hopping," Acton added. "Within one year, people can move to two or three jobs." He said, however, that those with obsolete skills are in jeopardy.

"The faucet is always turned on full blast. We're always looking, always evaluating. If you find somebody great, you grab them," said Karen Wall, director of human resources at BTG Inc., a Vienna-based contractor.

"A lot of what we're seeing is people moving from company to company. We're all sort of dealing with the same applicant pool," Wall said. "We're taking people from other companies. They're taking from us. It's a little bit of a circle game."

The game is played out several times a week, month after month, at hiring fairs staged by companies at the big hotels surrounding the Capital Beltway.

A two-day hiring fair sponsored by Oracle, for example, drew more than 150 job seekers to locations in Tysons Corner and Columbia last month.

Despite a threatening thunderstorm, a steady flow of applicants arrived after work at the Columbia site and made their way to Oracle recruiter Linda E. Holcombe, who took their resumes and asked them to wait for an interview. Some had heard about the opportunity on Oracle's radio ads. Some read about the fair in newspaper help-wanted columns.

Inside the interview room, they sat stiff-backed on straight chairs lined up against a wall, looking straight ahead, like patients in a doctor's office. No one touched the soft drinks and platters of bagels and rolls. Most wore power suits; some wore jeans. Most were employed at places like Price Waterhouse & Co., Lockheed Martin Corp., the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Baltimore Gas & Electric Co.

But few would fit the exact specifications that Oracle was seeking on this occasion -- a person with both the technical tools and the poise and experience to work with major clients on big data-management problems using Oracle products.

One who did have the right stuff was a man under 30 who was working as a computer systems consultant and had been asked back to the Columbia hotel for a second interview with Oracle.

The consultant, who requested anonymity, said two other firms had offered him salaries of more than $100,000, a big step above his current pay. He said he had turned them down to consider the Oracle offer, which was slightly less.

"It's hard," he said. "I always wanted to be making $100,000 by the time I was 30. It was one of my fantasies." Now he is more interested in a job that promises more stability and security than he has in his current job, with the chance of top pay as well. Oracle's Holcombe said the company has made him an offer and will take him on if he accepts.

If, after two days of screening candidates, Oracle can come up with two new hires, it's a good score, Holcombe said.

It is a familiar refrain.

"We've had 300 applicants [at one job fair] and didn't find any who were qualified," said Darlene White, technical recruiting specialist for Geico Corp., the insurance holding company based in Chevy Chase.

The employers wish they were seeing more qualified job candidates from colleges and technical schools. "The fact is that U.S. companies are leaders worldwide and it's also a fact that we can't attract enough students," said Olga Grkavac, vice president of the systems division at Information Technology Association of America, a McLean-based trade association.

Peng, a self-described computer illiterate in high school, chose computer science because it seemed like a good outlet for her love of problem-solving challenges. But many students are intimidated or turned off by the complex and demanding subject matter.

Craig Barber, a programmer at Geico, remembers the recruiter from the DeVry Institute of Technology, a computer technical school near Atlanta, who visited his high school class in suburban Maryland in 1986. "He showed a film and left his card. We were to contact him if we were interested. I was the only one who did from my class." He graduated from DeVry in 1990 and was hired by Geico. He now works with programming languages that didn't exist six years ago.

"It did surprise me to be the only one," Barber said. "I felt several candidates in my graduating class could have done an exceptional job in school and could be working beside me."

It would help, too, if companies took more responsibility for teaching employees programming and updating the skills of computer specialists that they have on board, said Kim Mackey, an instructional assistant in computer applications at Montgomery College.

Mackey has turned herself into a computer specialist through evening classes at Montgomery, graduating with an associate's degree in 1993 while winning the college's outstanding achievement award in computer applications.

Along the way, she sought to put her growing computer knowledge to use at the Maryland high-tech company where she worked while going to school. She was frustrated by her employers' reluctance to give her more opportunities to do so, she said.

"I don't think it's so much a shortage of people," Mackey said. "The industry needs to start looking from within."