There is a looming skills shortage crisis across the public sector, according to research from specialist IT recruiters Greythorn.

It highlighted that massive projects such as 2003’s 10-year, £4bn Defence Information Infrastructure project and the NHS National Programme for IT have meant no shortage of jobs in recent years, and analysts, technical architects and consultants alike have been only too happy to make the move from private to public sector considering the scarcity of large-scale projects in commerce and industry in the early 2000s.

However, the recent IT boom in both commerce and industry and financial services has meant a growth in movement of senior specialists from government projects back to these better-paid private sector positions.

Mark Verghese, director of Greythorn, says: “Some of the very largest projects have attracted extremely talented IT specialists from the private sector, because of their high profile and the technical challenges involved.

“However, the bad publicity about overspends has meant that there is now increasing pressure from the government to keep project costs down and that’s likely to mean less interesting work and reduced rates of pay, which in turn will make the whole arena less attractive to the best people.”