State of Tech: More jobs exist than local talent to fill them

O’Reilly Automotive Inc. (Nasdaq: ORLY) is known nationally for supplying parts to build car engines. But the word on Springfield’s streets says the publicly traded company is supplying a steady stream of jobs to build its own e-commerce platform.

O’Reilly Auto has been the poster child for IT officials talking about career opportunities. They throw around phrases like “the Amazon of auto parts.”

Maybe that’s overstating it. O’Reilly officials didn’t agree to an interview for this State of Tech report. But it’s a big deal over an extended period of time and with ramped up staffing – nearly 400 now work in O’Reilly’s information systems department. Fifteen years ago, there were 35.

The area’s current IT employment pool goes 4,000 deep. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in December, those employees represent 1.7 percent of the 238,000-person workforce across Springfield’s five-county metropolitan statistical area. The “information” sector has reached 5,000 employees locally, but that was in 2003.

Employers are doing what they can to move the dial.

“I see a ton of openings right now,” says Jason Klein, the 2016 chapter president of the Association of Information Technology Professionals.

Ask, “Who’s hiring?” and the names Bass Pro Shops, Expedia and BKD come up. Smaller project work consistently pops up at Digital Monitoring Products, Classy Llama Studios and JMark Business Solutions.

Then, there’s Jack Henry & Associates Inc., the stalwart of IT in southwest Missouri. The “Now Hiring” sign might as well say “Always Hiring.”

And that’s part of the workforce problem. The bigger part is the talent pool.

In short, more tech jobs exist than locally produced talent to fill them.

The 2016 State of the Workforce survey released last week by the Missouri Job Center bears this out. Some 60 percent of survey respondents throughout the seven-county area say they’ve had problems filling positions the past 12 months and over a third of them ended up not filling the jobs.

The identified gap was in skilled talent.

“That has been like trying to find gold here, lately,” said Derick Barnes, a business agent for the local heavy construction laborers union.

The workforce survey tells IT professionals they’re not alone. But they do know it’s a pain point.

“Finding qualified talent is a challenge for us,” said Greg Shoemaker, BKD’s recently promoted chief information officer, who splits his time in the Springfield and Dallas offices. “Whether it’s Dallas or Springfield, we’re all struggling to find the right talent. There are a lot of resumes out there, but finding the right person with the right experiences and culture fit is a challenge.”

The knock on the modern IT professional is this: He walks with an air of superiority, has difficulty relating to clients, blows up under stress and shows up to work with wrinkled clothes and messy hair.

“We are awkward and not the best at explaining things the rest of us understand,” Klein admitted. “Professional communication is a struggle across the board.”

But they’re in high demand.

The recent regional workforce survey placed IT in the top three industries for employment opportunity the next five-10 years. It’s been crawling out of a modern low of 3,600 jobs since early 2012, and if the forecasts are accurate, IT is on the cusp of bursting open in Springfield.

In Missouri State University’s computer science department, at least 18 of the 21 graduates last spring are working in their field, said Ken Vollmar, department head. About half of them took jobs in Springfield and three left the state.

“That’s a pretty good retention rate,” he said, well aware of the brain drain phenomenon.

Straight out of college, they’re making between $43,000 and $80,000 a year, he said.

According to the BLS, the 2014 annual mean wage in Springfield for computer and mathematical jobs was around $57,000.

Vollmar said his students’ first salaries in Springfield topped out at $55,000 and those taking jobs outside the market – Kansas City, St. Louis, Colorado and Texas – started at $65,000.

IT employment in the Springfield region is about on par with Missouri’s rate of 1.85 percent of the working population.

On the pay scale, Missouri’s annual mean wage of $75,000 for computer and mathematical jobs is well below the national wage of $84,000. But compared to Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, Missouri employers pay at least $5,000 more per year.

“Our tech jobs are paying more on average than surrounding states, yet our cost of living is so low,” Klein said. “It’s pretty easy to attract people to this area.”

Longtime tech employer Jack Henry has posted over 100 local openings since December on the JackHenry.com careers page, ranging from systems and network administrators to software engineers and malware researchers. Company officials also have taken to Twitter with the handle

@JackHenryJobs tweeting several openings per hour each workday.

At BKD’s Springfield headquarters last year, IT crews completed a project to move its data center servers and storage to a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. The local AITP chapter awarded the national public accounting firm with its Enterprise Technology Award for the roughly six-month and $940,000 project.

“It’s what major data centers use, those that are providing cloud services to the public,” Shoemaker said. “It lets you more rapidly deploy applications, basically create your own cloud environment that you can scale up at will. Think of it like the hardware and software coming together in a Lego-type environment, where you can piece the parts together as you need them.”

Shoemaker said existing staff handled the project, but now that it’s completed, he’s turning attention to finding local talent to deliver those projects.

“We’re right in the thick of our budgeting season and we’ll have some engineering positions opening up,” he said.