In regular chats with solution providers, I've been hard-pressed to find any president or CEO who doesn't rank HR issues -- recruiting, retention, compensation, etc. -- at or near the top of the list of biggest headaches facing their businesses today.

There are myriad reasons for the staffing woes, but the one universal appears to be the unrelenting need to expand the skill sets of the work force as today's IT solutions have grown so multifaceted and multidiscipline.

Nexus IS, formerly Expanet, has experienced hiring travails. Dave Elsner, vice president of sales and marketing for the solution provider and Cisco Gold partner, says the toughest thing for his firm has been finding workers who have mastered IP communications for call centers. The problem stems from the fact that the former Expanet's legacy was the TDM business, so when the company spun off to become Nexus IS it had to go through a massive retraining to get staff up to speed on the unified communications technologies it was adding to the business.

But even that wasn't the main problem.

"We were able to teach our existing staff unified communications effectively, but as we continue to grow the business, finding new resources to hire is very, very hard," explained Elsner.

Some vendors are stepping up to alleviate the pain. Microsoft, Cisco and IBM each have some type of initiative aimed at helping partners access affordable skills training for existing workers and recruit new ones through university programs and the like. These are relatively new efforts on the part of the tech giants, and it will take some time before their impact will be seen or felt.

Meantime, what's your biggest staffing dilemma and how are you trying to address it? Write to me at capril@cmp.com.