The absolute, sure fire way to determine whether there's a specific "shortage" is to look at the price of the product or service in alleged short supply relative to general inflation. In this case, there's no great mystery: we have solid wage/salary data in most developed countries. For example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes wage data annually by occupation. Even Forbes should be able to understand basic price theory. So let's take a look together, shall we?
As background, BLS publishes its Occupational Employment Statistics based on the month of May each year. The most recent data are from May, 2014, as I write this. You can find BLS's OES statistics here: http://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm So let's look at the National median salaries for occupational group 15-0000, "Computer and Mathematical Occupations." For reference, less than 4% of that occupational category consists of the second part ("Mathematical Occupations"), so we're really looking at IT occupations here with reasonable precision. Here are the median nominal wages (month of May each year, annualized) for the past 10 years along with nominal growth percentages year to year: 2014: $79,420 (+2.0%) 2013: $77,860 (+2.1%) 2012: $76,270 (+1.6%) 2011: $75,080 (+1.8%) 2010: $73,720 (+1.1%) 2009: $72,900 (+2.3%) 2008: $71,270 (+3.2%) 2007: $69,070 (+4.4%) 2006: $66,130 (+3.4%) 2005: $63,940 Also for reference, if you take the 2005 figure ($63,940) and plug it into BLS's Consumer Price Index inflation calculator, the 2014 figure would be $77,506. Thus the 2014 median wage in this occupational category is less than 2.5% above what the CPI-U inflation rate would predict if wages merely kept pace with inflation. As we can also see the rate of median wage increase in this occupational category has generally slowed over the past few years. I should also point out an important footnote: it appears that these statistics assume a fixed number of hours worked per year. There is some evidence that hours worked per year have increased somewhat over this time period. To net it out, we don't see evidence in these data that there's an IT labor shortage in the United States. Or, if there is a "shortage," it isn't getting materially worse. We could also look at productivity data -- perhaps one could argue that employers are getting less output for the same wage input -- but (to summarize briefly) the productivity statistics argue the opposite. My views are my own, as always here. The statistics are the Bureau's. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples IT Architect Executive, Industry Solutions, IBM z Systems, AP/GCG/MEA -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
