Wall Street Journal: Cognizant’s President Talks About Business Trends and the Shortage of Skilled Technology Workers in the U.S.

Gordon Coburn, President, Cognizant

“For a number of years, we saw clients focused on cost reduction alone,” Gordon Coburn tells Neal Lipschutz, Managing Editor of Dow Jones Newswire, in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “In the last few months, we have started seeing a shift to a dual mandate, where clients, especially those in North America, want to continue to reduce cost, but also want to spend on innovation and on growing their top-line.”

Coburn adds, “IT budgets are generally flat, but clients want to get more done with the budget. That is very good for Cognizant. We are seeing a shift in priorities, particularly in what we refer to as the SMAC stack – social, mobility, analytics and cloud. In the last few months, we have seen clients open the floodgates in terms of activity in those areas, both in technologies for their own employees as well as technologies they put in the hands of their customers. There is definitely a shift in where the spending is going.”

In response to a question on the shortage of technology talent, Coburn says, “When I look at the United States, there is a tremendous shortage of skilled IT workers. Unemployment rate for skilled IT workers is well below 4 percent. So essentially it is full employment. We recruit heavily at college campuses in the U.S. The average student that we are hiring has three other job offers. For our technology business, we need hardcore engineers and computer scientists, but not enough are coming out of the U.S. universities.”