Australian Reseller News, Computer Reseller News, New Zealand Reseller News and The Channel serve readers working at the sharp end of the information technology industry.

While many of the stories they cover are similar to those dealt with by other technology media, their specialised audience means the journalists need to filter information through a channel-oriented lens. In most cases this means asking “what does this mean for the channel” and sticking the answer at the top of the story.

Because people who sell or distribute technology read these titles, they are often slightly ahead of market trends. That’s because companies need to speak to resellers and distributors before speaking to the public.

When these publications work well, there’s a flinty realism to their approach. They tend to deal with the nuts and bolts of the business and not airey-fairy possibilities.

New Zealand’s The Channel is mainly advertorial – that is companies pay the publisher for stories written about their offerings. And all three other titles often run sign-posted advertising supplements – they also pad out local coverage with overseas stories of variable worth. Otherwise the publications are news-oriented.

You need to show the publishers of these titles you are a bone-fide computer industry person to get a subscription to the print publications, but all four run free access web sites.

Australian Reseller News

Computer Reseller News (Australia)

New Zealand Reseller News

The Channel (New Zealand)

Writing for the Australian edition of Lifehacker and drawing on research conducted by Monash University, Angus Kidman says one in four “independent professionals” took a pay cut last year and almost half say they expect they’ll need to be more flexible about their rates.

Kidman’s Contract Workers Are Seeing Pay Decline follows on from his What’s Happened To Your Salary In The Last Decade? which notes average Australian salaries climbed last year, which implies freelance and contract workers are falling behind full-time employees.

Despite the global financial meltdown and widespread lay-offs, Australia still faces serious skills shortages. The obvious answer is to drag in workers with the right qualifications and experience from overseas.

It’s not hard to attract skilled people to Australia; from many places overseas it can almost look like a Shangri-la. However, the bureaucratic hoops are daunting and, technology skills requirements are a fast moving target so in many cases, by the time applications are processed, employers demands have changed. Read the rest of this entry »

By Bill Bennett

Australian and New Zealand employers are out of touch with reality according to a research carried out by Hudson, a recruitment company.

Those aren’t the words Hudson uses, but it’s what the company means. In Talent Tightrope: Managing the Workplace through the Downturn, Hudson says; “Employers consistently think their employees’ sentiment is twice as good as it is in reality”.

“In every aspect of current workplace sentiment, whether job satisfaction, motivation, morale, perceived stress levels or job security employers are clearly unaware of their employees’ frame of mind.”

Mark Steyn, CEO Hudson A/NZ.

Read the rest of this entry »

Things might not look too hot at the moment, but pretty soon knowledge worker skills are going to be in demand again and the employers who showed a dark side during the recession will struggle to fill vacancies.

Despite the recession, New Zealand still has a severe shortage of building industry skills and there are pockets of the IT business where vacancies have remained since the global economic meltdown began.

Australia is already showing signs a severe shortage of IT skills could hamper companies and government departments as early as next year. For example in Demand for ICT professionals on the rise, bottom is in Stan Beer at iTNews reports; “The bottom in ICT employment has been reached and demand for skilled jobs is once again on the rise, according to the latest market survey from a major technology recruiter. The news adds to a growing list of evidence of a return to health of the ICT jobs scene.”

A week earlier ITNews covered a report from Australia’s largest recruiter Peoplebank saying the demand for contractors was rising. A similar story appeared in CIO magazine in June with Seek Employment noting the overall job market was stabilising with IT consultants in high demand.

Australia’s ITNews reprinted a story from Britain’s Computing newspaper on July 7 saying the antipodean nation is busily recruiting IT specialist in the UK to meet a shortage.

On a related note, The Australian reported on a skills shortage in research organisations in Upgrade ignores skills shortage. And the New Zealand Herald reports there are many shortages in engineering.

The New Zealand edition of CIO magazine carried a report which suggests the majority of employers in the IT sector still face a skills shortage despite the recession. Despite downturn, opportunities remain for APAC IT candidates suggests one in four tech employers expect to increase their headcount this year. The story singles out specific skills in business analysis, datawarehousing, ERP (Oracle/SAP), web development and infrastructure (architecture) as being of particular interest.”

Some shortsightedness is in evidence in IT training budgets slashed at ITNews which suggests employers have slashed skills spending and can expect to see a serious skills vacuum by 2112.

What does this mean?

First, it’s a safe bet the skills shortage will return to Australia in the next year or so and to New Zealand soon after – the two countries are effectively a single market for knowledge workers. If anything it could be worse than before for a couple of reasons. Many skilled workers will have drifted off into other occupations or even early retirement. At the same time employers have cut back on training during the recession. While there are increased numbers of people taking tertiary courses in technology and similar subjects, many won’t enter the workforce in time for the recovery and they’ll have knowledge, but little experience, which means only a handful will hit the ground running.

Employers who behaved cut back staff, skimped on training or held on to skilled workers and pushed them too hard during the recession will all suffer once the skills shortage kicks in again. Knowledge workers will be able to drive better bargains – and recent experience will teach people to look beyond the pay packet.

Yesterday I heard about an employer who boasts about deliberately hiring down-on-their-luck knowledge workers. The workers are offered low wages (monthly, not hourly), appalling insecure contractual terms and are bullied into working long hours and performing ethically dubious tasks. The conditions are borderline Dickensian.

From a worker’s point of view, it’s a nightmare. The manager thinks he is being clever. And in the short term he may be. But it’s a dumb strategy:

• First, despite everything, while some workers are desperate right now, most  still have options. Exploited workers will move on at the first opportunity. So an exploitative employer in any knowledge-based industry can expect to have an unstable workforce and be constantly getting new workers up to speed.
• Second, the recession isn’t going to last forever. Sooner or later there will be another skill shortage. In fact there are already signs of this in Australia. Employers with an exploitative reputation will struggle to find anyone willing to work for them. This applies to companies and to exploitative individuals.
• Third, having downtrodden workers impacts on other staff. Those who can will ask themselves “is my turn next?” Staff will options will bail out.

As the headline says, If your employment strategy is to hire desperate people, you’re in trouble.

Julie Starr’s Evolving Newsroom is a great New Zealand website about journalism and what we once thought of as the newspaper business. Starr writes as much about the technology underpinning modern journalism as the nitty gritty of the subject itself. While I doubt we’d agree on everything, I count her among the people who ‘get it’.

Recommended recent taster: Who pays for investigative journalism?

There’s no serious New Zealand counterpart to The Australian’s weekly Media section, which also appears online as part of the paper’s website. Given the section is part of Australia’s national daily newspaper, the focus is firmly on that country’s media, but there’s a huge overlap with New Zealand’s media industry and, anyway, the Australian does a good job of covering the big picture stories which affect us all. It’s not entirely unbiased — after all The Australian is part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited — and often shows Fairfax in an less flattering light and pulls its punches over News’ properties, but overall the coverage is well balanced. While the print section is weekly, the online news is updated regularly throughout the week.

Recommended recent taster: Free-to-air TV advertising income plunges

Another great Australian resource is the online-only mUmBRELLA which covers media and marketing. The site takes a much more light-hearted approach than the Australian, which can be a bit heavy at times. It also tends to focus on short, snappy pieces with a healthy dose of reader comments. From my point of view there’s a lower signal-to-noise ratio. Nevertheless it’s on my daily read list and I love it, although I hate the typographic silly buggers with the name.

Recommended recent taster: PRs turn focus to bloggers rather than journos

As the name suggests the anonymous writer of Freelance Unbound is a freelance journalist. He worked in the trade press in the UK and does a little teaching as well. I like the site, partly because it moves smoothly between big picture ‘think’ pieces and snappy little items — there’s often some fun and plenty of good reader comments. There’s some great material covering the point where the world of traditional journalism collides with social media and other online communications tools. The site also has an excellent voice, although I suspect that’s just the author’s natural voice.

Recommended recent taster: Blogs are dying. Great news for bloggers… and journalism graduates

Publishing 2.0 is an American site with a heavy focus on web publishing, it’s blurb says it is about “how technology is transforming media”. A lot of the material appears to be aimed at people managing traditional media companies – which in American tends to mean large corporation. Nevertheless there’s plenty of valuable ideas and news.

Recommended recent taster: Why we link: A brief rundown of the reasons your news organization needs to tie the Web together

So far I’ve carefully trying to avoid using the word ‘blog’. This isn’t because I’m some print era fogey in a state of digital denial. As far as I’m concerned it’s a term that conjures up the wrong image. But there’s simply no getting around the online journalism blog which appears to be written and edited by professionals exhibiting the very skills most bloggers seem to disdain. The site is primarily British, with correspondents from around the world. A lot of the material is aimed at showing switched on journalists how to use technology to improve their work.

Recommended recent taster: Chris Anderson’s ‘Free’: Not worth buying

I don’t always agree with Martin Hurst who sporadically makes entries on his Ethical Martini site, but his ideas are usually worth reading. Hirst is an academic who teaches at Auckland University of Technology and specialise in media ethics.

Recommended recent taster:The revolution will not be Twitter-ized

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The optimistic interpretation of the latest Olivier Job Index information technology figures says while the number of job ads continues to fall – the rate at which job ad numbers are falling has slowed. In other words, things are continuing to get worse, but not dramatically so. In fact the official line from Robert Olivier in this press release says things are stabilizing.

The Olivier Job Index measures the number of advertised job. In June the number of tech jobs fell 1.9 percent from May. They were down almost 57 percent from the same time a year ago. Both numbers represent a faster decline for tech jobs than for the overall job market.

According to a report last week in The Australian (Tech employment pool drying up by Jennifer Foreshew) only 16 percent of senior managers in Australia’s corporate sector expect to hire staff in the next 12 months and about a third intend to reduce their headcount. Foreshew spoke to a number of companies who made similar comments about a lack of new work.

Official figures issued by Australia’s Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) on Friday say the number of IT professional job vacancies dropped 7.5 percent in June compared with May. Year-on-year the total number of jobs declined by 63 percent.

New Zealand IT sector now positive

A report in today’s Computerworld New Zealand (New Hudson survey shows IT more positive by David Watson) draws on quarterly figures from the recruitment firm Hudson. It says a net 16.4 percent of employers intend to increase permanent staffing levels in the June to September quarter. That’s up from the previous quarter’s 7.7 percent figure.