MIFID2: Is MIFID2 the new Y2K?

A brief post on an interesting topic.  I recall the late 90s when we were told that Y2K would involve a near extinction-level-event.  Doom mongers talked of airplanes falling from the sky, nuclear powerplants going into meltdown and beer getting cold...

But we dodged that one and civilisation as we know it persisted.  Behind the scenes lots of people did a lot of work to ensure that systems were tested, fixed, replaced or decommissioned so that there were no severe problems. But at the time we saw real skill shortages in fields such as COBOL, FORTRAN and other technologies that often perform mission critical work but which are not where firms make current investments in IT.

So will be see a similar rush as firms realise they require people who have particular skills:

• network engineers who know the difference between NTP, PTP and pulse-per-second
• developers who can modify applications to use fine grained timestamps
• business analysts who can make sense of the MIFID 2 paper generation machine

Will we see a rush for skilled people later in 2016 and in early 2017 as firms realise that they need to pull talent from a small pool?