CareerBuilder also reports that 45 percent of IT employers have open positions for which they cannot find qualified talent. It’s that old skills-shortage problem again.

So what’s going on here? According to CareerBuilder CTO Eric Presley explains it thusly: “The pervasiveness of and reliance upon technology continues to escalate, and the amount of graduates in IT is trailing behind the demand for their knowledge and expertise.”

Interesting stuff… but more interesting to me is the effect that this shortage has on VARs and solution providers. Even in a down economy (I won’t use the “R” word) when demand isn’t near peak levels, these firms that have historically stockpiled deep benches of W-2 technicians are finding it almost impossible to find the IT skills and experience they need to have skills where and when their clients need them.

I’ve heard this same story from many VARs and solution providers in the past few months. While some of them have come knocking at our door to take advantage of the cost savings that come from using contract techs, most come to us simply because they can’t find service pros in specific geographic areas or skill sets like VoIP, Vista or flat panel TVs.

Regardless of the reason, it’s an interesting time in the overall market for IT and consumer electronics service professionals. And while Channel Insider also articulates a long-term solution to the shortage of skilled technicians, most insiders within the IT channel and the industry media don’t seem to anticipate supply catching up with demand anytime soon.

Panelists include: Don Anderson, Knowledge Manager from OnForce; Brian Sherman, Director of Industry Alliance from Autotask; and Steve Noel, Senior Engineer from Autotask. All OnForce buyers and pros are invited to this one-hour event.

Date: Wedneday, July 16th
Time: 1pm - 2pm ET
Registration: Join us for this discussion of best practices and proven methods to reduce overhead, improve response times and scale your services business.

It’s a great time to be an IT service provider, but there are many questions you face each day such as: How do I expand my geographic reach effectively without adding personnel? Or…How can I improve my customer service levels without additional overhead? Join Autotask and OnForce for answers to these questions and a discussion on automation and outsource management.

This one-hour event will cover:
-Market and technology trends for IT outsourcing
-Automating mission-critical IT processes, including billing, managed services, time entry, SLA management, and lead generation
-Best practices for growing geographic coverage, accessing specialized skill sets, or backing up your bench of W-2 techs with contract IT service pros
-How easy it is to use the Autotask and OnForce combination - Yes, they can be integrated, with powerful results.

Register today

To participate, providers just need to refer a buyer to OnForce, and instruct them to include their Tech ID as the “Referral Code” during the sign up process. OnForce will keep track of all buyers who sign up using a pro’s Tech ID. Then, anytime one of these buyers closes their first work order, the pro will receive $25 in your OnForce account.

The more active a referred buyers is, the more cash we’ll pay out:
• If that buyer closes 10+ more work orders within the next three months (after the month of their 1st work order), the pro earns an additional $100; OR
• If a buyer closes 100+ work orders within the next three months (after the month of their 1st work order), the pro earns an additional $1,000.

So each referred buyer can be worth $25, $125 or $1025, depending upon how active they are. There is no limit to the number of buyers a provider can refer, so the payouts are unlimited.

Check out the complete details of this program.

In addition to the 10-15 minutes of LED advertising that we received each game, we were fortunate enough to have our LED ads make it into a two-page spread in Sports Illustrated (see pages 8-9 of the June 2nd issue), the Celtics home page, and some serious exposure during the ESPN / ABC primetime telecasts (see below).

This is the first time we’ve done awareness-oriented marketing on this type of stage, but I suspect that you’ll see more such placements in the future. Here were a few of our favs:

Kevin Garnett takes a break under the glow of the OnForce LED ad…

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The C’s on their way to the title, and our ON button smiling down over the scene…

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The main scoreboard at The Garden, lit up with our “Find Pros Here” ad…

Giving Consumer Electronics Its Due: OnForce has split Consumer Electronics out separate from IT into its own category. This will enable providers to specify their CE skills more accurately, and buyers to find the pros with the right skills for CE work like installations of flat panel TV, home theater or audio devices.

Provider Skills Selector: As part of splitting CE into its own top-level category, we’ve revamped our skills selector that pros can use to profile their skills.

Work Order Templates: Buyers can now create work order templates that contain pre-defined information. This will save buyers time, hassle and keystrokes in creating new work orders from these templates. When a buyer creates a new work order, they can select a template to pre-populate some or all location, attachments, and routing rule info for that work order. Buyers can use templates that do or do not specify price, address or custom fields. Work order templates can be accessed in the BCC under “Company Settings”. Learn more.

Document management: You asked… we listened. Now, providers can submit work order documentation by uploading and emailing scanned versions of documents. Providers can print, complete and submit a doc by uploading the scanned TIFF files to the online work orders, by emailing the TIFF as an attachment to documents@onforce.com, or by submitting them via fax. Learn more.

*New Certifications: Based upon feedback from our buyers and pros, we’ve added new certs to the OnForce platform. Going forward, providers can add (and buyers can find pros with) the following certifications:

·Dell: Point of Sale Product, Foundation 2008 Desktop, Foundation 2008 Portables
·CompTIA: PDI+
·HP: MasterTech TV, MasterTech PC
·Apple: Apple Certified Macintosh Technician

We wrote this report and made it a completely free download because we recognize that this type of real-world, transactional info doesn’t exist anywhere else in the industry, and because it can inform the decisions of our community of buyers and professionals as they grow and sustain their IT service businesses. For example, we uncovered the following:

• Hourly rates are highest for work in VoIP, consumer electronics, and wiring & cabling, as much as 80% higher than some other IT categories.
• Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska are the most expensive states in the country (by hourly rates), whereas the lowest rates are in Georgia, Arizona and Oklahoma.
• New York, Houston and Chicago are the busiest cities for IT services; while Las Vegas, Miami, Orlando and Richmond all ranked surprisingly high our top 25 list.
• The most expensive cities for IT service work include Akron, Ohio; Topeka, Kan.; Irvine, Calif. and Parsippany, N.J.

Even though it was just released this afternoon, we’ve already gotten some amazing media coverage of this report, including from Channel Insider, SearchCIO and PHONE+. And while we love to see our name in lights, we’re mainly excited that these industry gurus and the buyers and providers that we’ve shared this with, see as much value in this type of info as we do.

If you have specific data requests (whether it’s for pricing a formal RFP response, or just trying to learn the cost of finding contract pros in an unfamiliar geography / category), drop me a line and we’ll help wherever we can. Or if you have information that you’d like to see in future editions of the State of the Industry report, we’d love to hear those ideas too.