SOURCE: Credit Suisse eMagazine
DATE: January 21st, 2008
Credit Suisse is working with a number of firms in India including a quasi BOT in Pune with Wipro.Karl’s comment about growth in IT specialist in India is not at the expense of Swiss employee but complements the growth in IT requirement of Credit Suisse.
ARTICLE
Switzerland has suffered a dearth of IT specialists for years. As part of informatica08, Credit Suisse wants to address the problem, one measure being to sponsor an Olympiad for young programmers. In this interview, Karl Landert, CIO of Private Banking and CIO Europe, explains why a major bank is an exciting place for future programmers.
Karl Landert, CIO Private Banking, Credit Suisse
In Focus: Credit Suisse is taking an active role in informatica08, and providing financial support to numerous projects. The first event in the Year of Informatics is the Swiss Olympiad in Informatics (SOI).
What is the purpose of this event?
Karl Landert: The SOI is a programming competition for young people under the age of 20. Its aim is to encourage high school students with an interest in science to get more closely involved with the subject matter of informatics. The top four competitors at the end of several rounds will qualify for the international finals, which will be held in Alexandria, Egypt, in August 2008.
What do you want to achieve by supporting this competition?
We want to draw the attention of the public, the government, and the educational system to the problem we’re facing in developing IT talent here at home. Thankfully, the media is gradually giving more attention to the issue. To begin with, the IT profession needs to be given a more positive image. But that’s not enough: Young people have to receive more specific encouragement. At the high school level, information technology must be increasingly taught as a subject in its own right, rather than just focusing on how it can be applied in other areas. Leaving aside the fact that there aren’t enough Swiss IT specialists: How good are the local programmers by international standards?Switzerland is definitely competitive at the tertiary level, a fact that is borne out by the many innovations our country has produced over the years. It’s a different story at the high school level, though, where IT has not been integrated into the curriculum. This makes it all the more pleasing to note that the Swiss have consistently managed to get among the medals at previous IT Olympiads.
In your opinion, where do the deeper causes lie for the current shortage of specialists?One possible cause may be the fact that we don’t know how to get young people interested in the subject. Students are taught about the latest scientific advances in physics and chemistry, while IT has been more or less neglected over the last 20 years. In general, engineering sciences tend to be seen as unpopular, even difficult, in the western world. Part of this is due to the fact that they involve a great deal of math. Added to this, IT earned itself a bad reputation after the dotcom bubble burst. This was magnified by the reported layoffs at the time, which ultimately involved only a very small portion of the workforce. Will image campaigns be enough to tackle the problem? Or, to put it another way: Don’t salaries have to be addressed as well?Salaries aren’t as high as they were before the dotcom bubble burst, but they continue to be very competitive. What is more, employee surveys consistently show that salary isn’t the main priority, especially in the case of highly qualified employees. So ultimately it’s not a problem of salary, it’s more about a perceived lack of future opportunities. What exactly can Credit Suisse offer to young IT specialists?They can look forward to working for a global company that allows them to familiarize themselves with a wide range of IT areas: from solution architecture to business engineering through to managing major projects. Then there’s specialist banking knowledge: At Credit Suisse, IT specialists can gain a deep understanding of how a financial company works. In the course of their career, IT specialists also have the opportunity to take on a number of roles and work in a variety of areas, including abroad if they want to. We use the most advanced technologies and systems available, particularly in security technology, an area in which we work closely with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Many people probably aren’t even aware that Credit Suisse is one of the biggest employers of IT specialists in Switzerland. Why does a modern bank require so many IT specialists?The bank is all about informatics. Without IT, it would be impossible to manage our products and services because much of what we do involves virtual products. These range from year-end processing, where we print out between 15 and 16 million sheets of paper, to the extremely specific, very complex algorithms we use to calculate and model our products.
In the course of globalization, western companies such as Credit Suisse have created many IT jobs in locations such as India. How prominent is Switzerland on the global IT map?It’s still very prominent. As I mentioned, in the last three years we have created more IT jobs than we’ve lost – despite offshoring to other countries. Actually offshoring isn’t really the right term, because the newly created jobs don’t compete with the job market here in Switzerland, they complement it. Switzerland will remain a location for highly qualified IT specialists.
Related Posts
