LONG-TERM LABOR OUTLOOK IS MURKY

There is some skepticism about doomsday projections that the U.S. economy will take a major hit if IT jobs are not filled, partly because past projections didn't accurately predict today's situation.

'We didn't anticipate the impact that client/server would have on the employment market in the early'90s," says Ed Yourdon, chairman of the Cutter Consortium, in Arlington, Mass. We didn't anticipate the enormous demand for year-2000 programmers. If you lookforward, we just don't know."

Another reason for caution isthatthe act of predicting future shortagescould alleviate those shortages.

"There were years in the early '90s when there were hundredsof thousands of unemployed programmers, and it looked like a very bad profession," says Avron Barr, co-diredor of software studies at the Stanford Computer Industry Project, in Stanford, Calif.

This poor outlook is one of the reasons experts think the number of students graduating with U.S. bachelor's degrees in computer science - one indicator of the number of workers entedng IT - declined between 1986 and 1995 by 42 percent to 24,400.

A recent National Software Alliance report estimates the number of openingsfor software workers nationwide is approximately 137,000 annually. And just as computer science enrolimen s fell when it was hard to find IT wo k, they are climbing again now.

'It's kind of cyclical,' Yourdon says. 'If there's a shortage nowand word drculates that programmers are making a ton of money, that is ultimately going to motivate a bunch of college kidsto go into the industry.' Some say that the situation could well ease in the next few years, at least in some areas.

But not everyone is so optimistic. Barr predicts that the overall shortage of skilled software workers will force some companies to cancel or postpone projects that could increase their competitiveness.

"The shortage is here,' Barr says. 'Its going to be here for 10 years or more, and it's going to cause some companies to fail.'

At the National IT Workforce Convocation in Berkeley, Calif., last month, Gale Fitzgerald, chairman and CEO of CTG, an IT services company in Buffalo, N.Y., said that in addition to losing moneytorecruitingandtrainingcostswhenstaff members have to be replaced, businesses are missing opportunities for innovation while they focus on filling their staffs.

'The cost of inaction is extremely high," Fitzgerald said.

Also at the con ocation, business, education and government leaders talked about long-term solutions to the labor shortage. These include government spending on IT training for workers from other fields and for students; efforts to improve IT's image; greater cooperation between business and educational institutions so that high school and colleges produce skilled workers; and possibly increasing the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States as IT workers.

Meanwhile, many industry watchers say that although the labor shortage is a challenge to the IT community, it is not an insurmountable one.

"I think that human ingenuity being what it is, over the next few years we will find our way around the problems this of this labor shortage," says Malcolm Solvin a service director at the Meta Group in Reston, Va. It's not beyond our capabillity to do."