Higher Ed's Real IT Shortage Isn't People. It's What They Take With Them.
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Ask a CIO in higher ed when their IT staffing shortage started, and most will point to the last year or two. AI got introduced, everything got more complicated, and suddenly the team felt too small. But EDUCAUSE was writing about this same shortage back in 1998, describing the same gap between open IT positions and the qualified people to fill them. This isn't a new problem wearing an AI costume. It's an old problem that finally got loud enough to hear.
Colleges and universities have struggled to recruit and retain IT talent for decades. Long before AI entered the conversation, institutions were already competing for technical talent against employers who could pay more and move faster. What has changed is not the shortage itself. What has changed is the amount of work sitting on top of it.
AI added a new layer of responsibility to teams that were already stretched. EDUCAUSE's 2026 workforce research found that institutional change, including the push around AI, is largely being absorbed at the team level rather than through any real redesign of how work gets staffed. Most teams expect they'll need to support their institution's AI strategy, and most of those same teams say they feel only somewhat prepared to do it. The shortage did not get worse overnight. It just became a lot harder to work around quietly.
Most conversations about IT staffing shortages focus on headcount: not enough people to do the work. That is real, but it is only half the picture.
"The technology in higher ed keeps advancing, and that's a good thing. But the people who've spent ten or fifteen years growing into these systems carry knowledge that never made it into a manual. When they retire or move on, that knowledge often goes with them, and it compounds the staffing shortage as much as an empty seat does."
— Moira Kirkland, Senior Vice President, Doctums
Someone who started in IT support and became the administrator who understands exactly why a process works the way it does at their institution, not just how the system is supposed to work in theory, is carrying more than a job title. When that person leaves, the shortage of people compounds a shortage of knowledge, and the two make each other worse.
When a team is maxed out, the reflex is to bring in new technology or a new hire and hope it closes the gap. In practice, that rarely works, because the problem usually isn't the technology.
"The pattern I see over and over is institutions trying to buy their way out of a broken process with a new system, a new integration, or a new dashboard, without ever mapping out what's actually happening today. Technology doesn't fix a process that's fundamentally misaligned, it just makes the dysfunction faster."
— Zach Richards, Higher Education Consultant, Doctums
Richards' approach starts before any tool gets selected: getting the functional and technical teams in the same room, mapping the process together, and agreeing on what should happen before deciding which system supports it.
"Alignment has to come before automation," he says. "Everyone wants the new tool, but if the people who live in the process every day and the people who build the system don't agree on what's happening, you're just automating the disagreement."
The instinct to treat staffing as a hiring problem misses what institutions actually need. It isn't a choice between bringing in outside help or improving how things run internally. It's both, at the same time.
Getting a process to run smoother, while still leveraging the team already in place, usually starts with staff augmentation: bringing in outside support to help map where the technology stands today, where the institution wants it in five years, and what road gets it there. From that foundation, institutions can start hiring deliberately for the skills they'll actually need down the line, instead of hiring reactively for whatever broke most recently.
This is where a partner earns its place, and it's rarely just an extra set of hands.
It's this exact gap, capacity, expertise, and continuity all at once, that's part of why Doctums exists. We see it often enough in our own work with institutions that it shapes how we think about staffing conversations from the start.
Staffing support solves part of the problem. The other part is making sure institutional knowledge doesn't walk out the door when someone does.
That is where documentation becomes part of the strategy, not an afterthought. Refining and recording how an institution actually runs its processes builds a kind of legacy that outlasts any one person's tenure.
None of this starts with a new hire or a new system. It starts with stepping back to see which teams need to be aligned, and finding a partner who can help optimize across all of it, not just patch the most visible gap.
If your team is stretched thin and you're not sure whether the answer is more hands, better alignment, or both, that conversation is a good place to begin. And if you're wondering how this connects to the way institutions are also navigating AI on campus day to day, we wrote about that here.
Contact us to talk through where your team stands.
Written by Doctums Staff
