For several years we've been reading news stories about the impending shortage of skilled IT workers. The predictions have been fairly dire: As baby boomers retire and fewer young people join the IT workforce, hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs will go unfilled.

IT projects will languish because companies can't find the workers with the right skills to staff them. We'll need more imported workers coming in to this country under H1-B visas, and we'll have to send more work overseas to outsource agencies.

Baloney!

There's no shortage of smart, employable IT workers. There is a shortage of flexible employers who are willing to hire people who don't match an exact, niche profile or have a very specific skill or type of experience. There is a shortage of companies willing to invest in the training and development of enthusiastic and committed employees.

What do you think? Jump into our forum on the alleged worker shortage.

There is a shortage of corporations that see their employees as long-term assets and not as overhead that can be ditched at the first hint of a bad quarter. There is a shortage of organizations willing to implement formal mentoring and internship programs that will help the next generation of employees grow into the labor force for the long haul.

Too many employers have set their sights on the ideal candidates - the ones who come with the right degrees in hand, the right credentials on the résumé and the right project experience under their belt. Heaven help the candidate who lacks a certification, or who has extensive experience with one application and not another.

He'll never get noticed, because the résumé screening software has already chucked him into the waste bin. The software doesn't know, of course, that someone with good Windows administration skills can learn Linux skills to become the new Linux administrator who's desperately needed.

A recent editorial in the San Jose Mercury News by Christopher Moylan, a lecturer in chemistry and director of the undergraduate laboratories at Stanford University, made me stand up and cheer. Moylan's story is about scientific and engineering jobs in Silicon Valley, where he lives, but the same can be said about IT jobs across this country.

Moylan accuses companies of setting themselves up for the worker shortage. He cites examples of firms that disgorged tons of highly skilled workers during the economic downturn of a few years ago. While many of these workers took lower-paying jobs in different fields, their former employers scream that they can't find enough workers today. At the same time, these companies have cut pay and benefits, and eliminated the notion of job security, making it less likely that college-bound students will ever want to enter the fields in need of workers.