Netsuite takes cloud skills to uni as ICT salaries stagnate

Business-applications provider Netsuite has scored a vote of academic legitimacy for cloud applications by getting the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) to integrate cloud training into its postgraduate MBA and Master of Business courses.

The partnership comes under the auspices of Netsuite’s SuiteAcademy educational program, which has been developed to boost the presence of cloud-based business tools within university curricula. This will see students trained on the use of NetSuite, a broad cloud-based business software platform, to learn how it mirrors real-world process flows and revenue cycles.

SuiteAcademy has already attracted over 100 universities around the world, all of whom are trying to update their business credentials to make them as relevant as possible for the modern business world.

“Our partnership with NetSuite is about producing work-ready graduates for a market rapidly embracing cloud computing,” UTS Business School dean Prof Roy Green said in a statement. “Given cloud software automates many traditional professional functions, our graduates need to be lateral thinkers capable of adding value to organisations in new ways.”

Those lateral thinkers may be working smarter as well as harder, but that doesn’t mean they and their ICT-management peers will necessarily see the benefits of their efforts in the form of increased salaries.

The recently released Hudson ICT Salary & Employment Insights 2013 report found that fully 75.1% of ICT professionals are taking on more responsibilities than they had a year ago, but that 56.1% said they had not been financially compensated for the added responsibilities.

In other words, job descriptions may be changing but employee value-add isn’t necessarily being recognised with commensurate pay rises. It’s also not necessarily due to the impetus of the employees themselves: in many cases, workers are simply being given more responsibility after a teammate leaves and – in four out of five cases – isn’t replaced by the employer.

Combine that with the 78.9% of ICT staff seeing budgets tightened, 69.4% who say they are managing greater workloads and 62.5% who are finding it harder to hire staff, and it’s little wonder that 4 in 10 ICT professionals feel more stressed at work than they did a year ago: their responsibilities are increasing, and expectations commensurately increasing.

To keep up, Hudson’s ICT national practice manager Martin Retschko says companies need to invest in training their employees – and business-app training like the NetSuite Academy is just the beginning.

“In terms of the IT skills the market is demanding, big data technology is advancing rapidly and demand for professionals with expertise in this field outstrips supply,” Retschko said in a statement. “At the most senior levels, success is about far more than technical skills – and the most sought after candidates are excellent communicators, and have the commercial acumen to deliver solutions that drive business outcomes.”

Key areas of demand include enterprise architects, cloud-computing experts, relationship and supplier managers, mobile application developers, change specialists, health informatics professionals and digital specialists. If Hudson’s figures are right, that may mean increased market value for graduates of Netsuite’s cloud-ERP training – or it may just see them working harder for the same compensation. – David Braue