Digital transformations are being hampered by a serious skills shortage, but businesses can still dive into digital if they develop the right strategy.
We’ve all seen the headlines: talent shortages plague vendors; a million unfilled vacancies globally. Truly, skilled tech staff are like gold dust: valuable, but easily lost.
Surveys back up the bad news: according to analysts IDC, more than 70 per cent of IT leaders globally view the skills gap as an urgent concern. Gartner, meanwhile, found that 64 per cent of managers don't think their employees are able to keep pace with future skill needs and, furthermore, 70 per cent of employees said that they haven't even mastered the skills they need for their jobs today.
Given the rapid transformations experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic such as underscoring the urgency of the need to go digital, not to mention it resulting in swathes of resignations, it would not be much of an exaggeration to call the situation a crisis.
Hoping that things will go back to normal is not an option. The ‘new normal’, if it means anything, means tight labour markets, in which employees, having looked at their lives, are demanding change. In the US, an average of 3.98 million people left their jobs every month during 2021, and the numbers of employees voluntarily leaving their jobs in the last two months of the year and in the first month of 2022 continued to climb according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The US is not an outlier, either. Bloomberg reports that The poll of 1,226 UK managers, conducted in December 2021 points to as a profound shift in the labour market, while Deutsche Bank’s chief UK economist Sanjay Raja has said analysis of official data suggests people are resigning at the highest rate since 2009 with “historically elevated levels of workers leaving the labour market entirely”.
Taken together, the two trends pose a real problem for business: at precisely the time highly-skilled tech staff are required in order to drive necessary digital transformation projects, tech workers, already a scarce commodity, are joining other corporate colleagues in picking and choosing where, when, and even if, they want to work.
Naturally, skilled staff are needed throughout the digital transformation process, from developing the vision at board level through to designing the projects with purpose that define whether or not a transformation will be a success. There is an answer, though: talent-as-a-service (TaaS).
The numbers crunch
At first it was most noticed in infosec: an estimated million IT security roles have remained unfilled globally in recent years. Today, the problem has been generalised. A recent recruitment survey found that, in the UK alone, 70 per cent of technology employers were suffering skills shortages. Existing in-house IT teams, meanwhile, are already stretched thin keeping-on the lights and many lack strategic project delivery skills.
Practical experience is also an issue, as are learning curves. Take developers: while coding is a transferable skill, a Python specialist will find moving to C/C++ harder than a Java expert will. Likewise, knowledge of the Windows platform does not guarantee the ability to quickly adapt to Linux or QNX. Add in specialist skills in cloud, mobile, data analytics, DevOps and more, and the general demand for deploying other ultra-recent technologies and it only gets worse. Talent retention is an issue, too, with the best staff able to hop around in search of more pay, greater promotion prospects or a better work-life balance.
Given, then, that skilled staff are in short supply, and the macroeconomic environment is making the problem worse, help is required – and it comes in the form of talent-as-a-service (TaaS).
TaaS is the clearest answer to address the problem because it not only provides the talent, but it does so in a way that can get the job done. In other words, TaaS allows businesses to work with a partner with a proven track record in delivering and executing technology projects, including digital transformation.
Engaging with a proven TaaS provider like Mobica means strategic projects can be delivered, even in these challenging times, because in the absence of the right people to drive digital transformation, from the boardroom to developers, no project can succeed. Talent-as-a-service bridges the talent gap and brings businesses the skills they need now in a flexible fashion. Skilled external staff work with yours, fully integrated into your teams, to get under the skin of advanced technologies and the challenges they bring, with the end result that you can deliver dramatic change at speed and at scale.
Key takeaways
Skilled staff are in short supply, and the macroeconomic environment is making the problem worse. Without the right people to drive digital transformation, from the boardroom to developers, no project can succeed. At the same time, transformation is more necessary than ever, but businesses can still dive into digital if they develop the right strategy. The answer is talent-as-a-service (TaaS), bridging the talent gap and bringing businesses the skills they need now in a flexible fashion
To find out more about how Mobica can help you deliver digital transformation in the face of a severe skills shortage...
