E.P.I.C. APM to relieve ICT job shortage problems?

CA Technologies has highlighted on its blog how its E.P.I.C. APM tool can help address the ICT skills shortage in Europe, detailing what is needed from the education system to improve the situation down the road.

Marcel den Hartog, principal for product marketing, EMEA, wrote on the CA Technologies website about the looming shortage of IT specialists. He highlighted how the Netherlands currently have 34,000 vacancies for IT specialists, while the UK, Germany and Italy all have over 60% of all ICT vacancies in Europe.

Marcel den Hartog places some of the blame on the education system: "…we don’t train people for the jobs employers are looking to fill. We also don’t cover enough IT in mid-level schools. Where we do (i.e. high school and universities), we don’t teach them things they are able to use immediately."

"But it will be a long process to solve this. In the meantime, we have to look for other solutions – one of them is to use the time we spend on developing applications more efficiently. In other words, "Do more with less."

Writing anecdotally, Marcel den Hartog raises the issue of developers spending less than 50% of their time on coding, instead spending it onwaiting and searching for hardware that is now available, or servers that are not configured.

"For testing capabilities, they wait on other programmers to finish their bits on data from the network, database, application and hardware teams to help them solve performance issues." Marcel den Hartog added.

Marcel believes that APM is an area where time-savings can be made. APM solutions can help to solve performance bottlenecks and to monitor the setting of baselines in the cheapest way.

Another benefit is that once the application is released monitoring is in place, which helps give performance insights and helps deal with bottlenecks.

Therefore, CA Technologies is hoping its E.P.I.C. APM will help make the solution easier. E.P.I.C. stands for Easy, Proactive, Intelligent and Collaborative. The product is aimed to help fill the gap until education steps up and fills the skills gap:

"So, if you can’t wait for the education system to fix their problems, there are other things you can do to make your IT people more effective," commented Marcel.