TEK Report: IT Companies Favor Temporary Hiring

The quarterly IT Executive Outlook Survey, conducted by TEKsystems (News - Alert) in partnership with the Inavero Institute, revealed that the option of hiring temporary IT staff was more popular than increasing permanent IT staff.

Three-thousand IT leaders, who represented all industries, regions and company sizes, took part in the third quarter 2011 online survey which concluded in June 2011. Eighty-six percent of the respondents were managers and directors and 14 percent were IT executives.

According to the report, there was a four percent increase in the number of IT leaders that planned to increase the temporary staff in the next three months, while there was a decrease of three percent in the number of IT leaders that planned to increase their permanent IT staff. The figures referred to the previous quarter.

The report cited difficulty in finding relevant IT specialists as the primary reason for the change in thinking. The survey also revealed the difficulty in sourcing top IT professionals across industries and how IT companies struggled to find systems administrators, BI specialists, business process engineers, network architects and .NET (News - Alert) developers.

In a press release, TEKsystems Market Research Manager Tania Lavin said, “Continued economic uncertainty makes contract workers more appealing,” and added, “IT leaders would rather hire consultants on a project to project basis than ramp up full time teams without specific initiatives in mind.”

Lavin highlighted the difficulty of finding enterprise and cloud architects and BI specialists and said that the high demand by IT firms for such specialists, both for internal and external needs, only succeeded in making the 'temporary option' a better one.

TEKsystems’ quarterly IT Executive Outlook Survey is designed to keep IT companies informed of significant and emerging trends so that they can effectively plan and implement their initiatives realistically.