Owen Hughes
| August 6, 2021 — 15:25 GMT (16:25 BST)
| Topic: Building the digital workforce: Tech skills trends and strategies for success
Tech workers are preparing to quit. That’s a big problem for businesses
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With more companies looking towards a digital-first approach to business going forward, demand for digital skills is on a sharp upwards trajectory. Finding developers, cybersecurity professionals and cloud migration experts is top of the agenda for many hiring managers as organisations look towards long-term growth and sustainability, following a period of rapid transformation.
This demand has continued into 2021. According to Harvey Nash’s 2021 Tech Salary and Hot Skills report, published June 2021, cybersecurity remains the number one skill for employers in the UK (31%) and the US (36%). “Demand has increased throughout the pandemic as security specialists have been required to play the key role of keeping businesses protected during the unprecedented challenges of moving to mass homeworking,” Harvey Nash CEO Bev White told ZDNet.
SEE: Cybersecurity: Why a culture of silence and driving mistakes underground is bad for everyone
Drilling down into the types of roles businesses are hiring for, ethical hackers, information security analysts, chief information security officers (CISOs) and cybersecurity consultants all feature prominently, Harvey Nash found.
Alongside IT security, employers also seek cloud and data/analytics expertise, again reflecting the demands of changing business needs as digital transformation accelerates and more businesses make the wholesale shift towards remote working.
Among the cloud-specific roles companies are hiring for, Harvey Nash identified strong demand for “cloud architect”, “cloud engineer”, “cloud security specialist”, DevOps engineer and “Amazon Web Services specialist.
“Organisations are maturing beyond simply moving software online and becoming more sophisticated in how they deploy and exploit their online assets, for instance through distributed cloud, edge computing and marketplace platforms,” Harvey Nash said.
Data everywhere
Within the data and analytics realm, companies are particularly eager to fill roles including “data analyst”, “data scientist”, “data engineer” and “business intelligence analyst,” Harvey Nash found.
“The skills driving transformation are the ones that are focused on the customer, as well as those that stitch together the ever-increasing array of technologies and platforms,” said White.
“On the customer side we are seeing increasing demand for UX experts, as well as digital experts with strong customer-facing and product development skills. On the technical side we are seeing an increase in demand for architects with a strong focus on cloud platforms.”
Demand for more niche skills is also beginning to emerge as businesses digitize, particularly those related to automation and artificial intelligence/machine learning technologies. Gathering the data businesses need to inform the next steps of their transformation journey is one thing; making sense of it and putting it to use is quite another.
Organizational change management (27%), enterprise architecture (23%), technical architecture (22%) and advanced analytics (22%) were also identified as skills facing shortages in the company’s 2020 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey.
Outlook
The digital skills deficit is not a new problem for businesses, but it is one that has been made significantly more urgent due to COVID-19.
Digitization efforts may have put many companies in a better position to tackle the challenges of an increasingly data-driven economy, but it has also driven further demand for tech workers with the skills needed to see these plans through – as well as keep driving them forward.
Employers face a problem here: at the same time as demand for technology workers is on the rise, the pool of available talent is quickly shrinking. Software developers, cloud engineers, DevOps professionals and cybersecurity technicians are all needed to build, maintain and protect businesses as they move towards the next steps of their transformation journeys, which have been accelerated by the global pandemic.
In order to meet their increasingly complex technical needs, businesses will need to become experts at both attracting and retaining this talent in an increasingly competitive jobs marketplace, as well as levelling up their existing employees with the skills they need to develop at pace. While this may not completely compensate for the shortage of tech talent, it will go some way to address the issue of a widening skills gap in a time of rapid digital innovation.
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Owen Hughes
| August 6, 2021 — 15:25 GMT (16:25 BST)
| Topic: Building the digital workforce: Tech skills trends and strategies for success