Business IT Grads Have No Trouble Finding Jobs

By Angela Manese-Lee
Roanoke Times & World News
03/29/08 4:00 AM PT

While the economy crumbles, jobs are plentiful for graduates of business information technology programs. They are seen as good employment prospects because they have IT skills as well as business knowledge. Meanwhile, BIT program enrollment is down sharply.

For job-searching college seniors, the weeks before graduation are sometimes spent retouching resumes, suiting up for interviews and nervously awaiting offers.

Brian Tajo, however, is sitting pretty.

The Virginia Beach native, one of 105 seniors graduating with a degree in business information technology, has already scored a job with IBM (NYSE: IBM) Latest News about IBM Global Services. Come mid-July, he'll be based out of New York working as a consultant. He'll be earning an enviably high salary: US$68,000, plus a $5,000 signing bonus.

Economic Bright Spot

Apparently, in this time of economic uncertainty, it's good to be a BIT major.

In "one of our senior seminars, over 90 percent of students in that class already have jobs," said Terry Rakes, a BIT professor in Virginia Tech's Pamplin College of Business. "The remainder are interviewing or are going to graduate school."

The statistics, while beneficial for individual students, shed light on a trend some within the department find worrying: While employer demand for BIT-trained students is high, the number of students enrolled in the major is on the decline.

At its height in 2001, BIT enrollment reached 817 students, but since then, the number has dropped steadily: to 528 in 2003; 397 in 2005; and 283 in 2007.
No Bounce

"Our enrollments are very much driven by the job market, but what has been unusual is that demand has come back very strongly for graduates in our department, but the students haven't come back," said BIT department head Bernard Taylor. "That's an anomaly that we haven't quite figured out what's going on."

Taylor's department isn't the only one facing a shortage.

"After 2000, when we had the dot-com bust, I think departments across the nation have seen a decrease," said Anna Elder, an academic adviser with Management Information Systems in the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business. "We're working on building our program back up now because the job market is just booming."

Elder said MIS currently graduates 30 to 35 students a semester but would like to increase that figure to 50 to 60 to meet pressure from potential employers.

"Just not enough people are getting into it to supply the demand," she said.
Growing Market

The demand isn't likely to disappear.

According to national employment projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, network systems and data communications analysts, computer software engineers in applications and systems, computer systems analysts and database administrators represent five of the 30 fastest growing occupations from 2006 to 2016.

"The IT market really got hot in the early '90s and you had all this publicity about these people making millions of dollars developing Web sites and doing things on the computer," Taylor explained. "And it all went bust around 2000, 2001 and when that happened the economy sort of went into a little bit of a recession [and] 9/11 really hurt the IT industry ... but now, the IT industry in the United States has recovered, as evidenced by the job market, but we don't have enough students coming into the area."
Question of Skills

Taylor and Rakes say it's a problem of perception.

Students and their parents, they said, think most jobs in the information technology industry have shifted overseas, leaving few employment prospects for would-be systems analysts and information managers.

That, Taylor said, is incorrect.

"Those jobs that have been outsourced and will continue to be outsourced, have a low skill level and our students have to have a pretty high skill level because they're developing computer systems," he explained.

Gary Kinder, director of undergraduate career services at Pamplin, said BIT recruitment hit its peak in 1999 and 2000, when companies were concerned about Y2K compliance.

It has since fallen off a little, Kinder noted, but over the past few years has stabilized.
Fierce Competition

According to Kinder's on-campus interview stats, BIT students averaged more than four interviews each during 2006-07.

About 100 employers interview BIT students on-campus each year.

With a small pool to pick from, these companies often end up trying to recruit the same students -- a situation that often results in multiple offers, higher starting salaries and incentives such as signing bonuses and free laptop computers.

"From an employer's standpoint, the competition gets stronger to work with those young folks to find a good fit, and it's having them start earlier," Kinder said. "They're not recruiting seniors for full-time jobs anymore, they're recruiting freshmen, sophomores and juniors for internships and hoping for a rollover effect from internships to full-time work."

Teresa Carter, a Tech alumna who recruits students for General Electric (NYSE: GE) Latest News about General Electric, said the company, which is working to develop a pipeline between co-ops and internships and full-time jobs, interviews BIT students for positions in its Information Management Leadership Program.

"We like the BIT students for a couple of reasons," Carter said. "They have some of the technical background ... [but] they also get a good business sense."

Brian Williams, a BIT major who graduated from Tech in December, said he applied for jobs with five or six companies and received offers from five, with salaries ranging from the low-$50,000s to the high-$60,000s.

"It seemed so easy to get jobs because there's such a high demand for talented people in the BIT major," said Williams, who now works with Deloitte Consulting in Washington, D.C.
Shortage of Students

Yet while students such as Williams reap the benefits of increased competition, the empty seats around them have forced the department to downsize.

Taylor said there were about 23 BIT faculty members in 2000, compared with 17 now.

"It's probably more enjoyable for the student and the faculty member when the class sizes are smaller, so that's not the downside," Rakes said. "The downside is, as a state institution, we're trying to educate the sons and daughters of the people in the commonwealth and so, if we've got the capacity to service those students and they're not coming to us, then that's obviously a concern."

To help convince prospective students of the benefits of a BIT degree, Taylor said the department makes presentations to students who have yet to decide on a major and tries to call attention to median starting salaries.

Among members of the 2005-06 graduating class, BIT majors had the sixth-highest median starting salaries, at $52,000.

Rakes said this year's graduates are likely to pull salaries in the low- to mid-$60,000s.

"They're not going to do that out of the goodness of their hearts," he added of companies offering high salaries and signing bonuses. "They're doing that to get that particular person they want."