I think there’s a gap in the market which recruitment agents could potentially exploit. It’s been many years since I stopped contracting. Now back on the market little has changed in my communication with them.
Lots of roles, lots of JDs, lots on interest. The gap exists between what the JD says and what your CV/experience says. I really think Recruitment Agencies should start an element of providing Skills Training. No not for new up & coming agents to teach them sales techniques, pipeline management etc. No, I think they should offer courses in real world IT skills, if anyone knows where the real skills shortage is it’s recruitment agencies.
I don’t think they should offer courses to regurgitate facts so you can simply ace the certification exam. What is really needed is a course that blends learning the facts with gaining the experience – the ‘doing’ (doing it right, wrong, troubleshooting to turn the wrong into right). Short courses for contractor in-between contracts, longer for those in them.
With IaaS, SaaS and DaaS offerings from AWS, Azure and prices going down there’s no longer a need to provide a big cash drop for datacenter setup for this. Recoup the billing costs (which won’t be massive) by having agreement to be preferred agency used by contractor or similar.
In fact you could get the initial design, deployment and configuration for future re-use of such a ‘lab’ environment completed by the first set of people you train. Those doing can produce the training based on their experience in building the thing.