Data architecture, cybersecurity, and privacy skills in are in high demand
With global economic conditions showing stability and the pace of technological change increasing, the corporate world now has both the means and the need to start shoring up their technical human resources in order to compete. This is supported by a new report on the digital talent gap from Capgemini (one of the world’s largest tech consulting firms) and Linkedin.
Talent gap
The main finding of Capgemini’s report is just how under resourced most companies are when it comes to digital talent. The report states “Over half (54%) of the organizations agreed that the digital talent gap is hampering their digital transformation programs and that their organization has lost competitive advantage because of a shortage of digital talent.”
This is quite a startling statistic, with most companies worried their IT staffing has already put them on the back foot, this bodes well for those in demand but less well for cash-strapped companies.
Training
Interestingly, this capability shortage isn’t being helped by the companies themselves internally. Despite having most the resources at their disposal to upskill their employees, most training and education of digital talent is abysmal according to staff, with “more than half of today’s digital talent saying that training programs are not helpful or that they are not given time to attend”, while 45% go as far to say the training available is “boring” and “useless”.
This speaks to the lack of clarity about the way to remedy the situation among businesses, which is reinforced by the fact that even if they know the need to improve, they still don’t know how: “50% said they keep talking about the digital talent gap but not doing much to bridge it”.
Soft skills
A surprising finding related to the nature of the digital skills gap. Not just purely a question of technical knowledge, the talent gap also extends to digital soft skills. Communication, leadership, and customer-centricity are perceived as being even more lacking than hard skills according to the respondents.
Changes in industry
Taken together, these findings point to the difficulty facing many workers. With a lack of proper training and a sense of urgency on the part of employers, many employees are seemingly justifiably concerned about their futures. This translates into a striking 38% believing their skillset will be redundant in the next 4-5 years.
The must-have digital roles
Aside from this dreary outlook, there is useful material suggesting what hard skills are in demand. Unsurprisingly, new fields like AI are very in demand, as are recent market stalwarts like analytics development expertise.
Data architecture, cybersecurity, and privacy consultants also top the skills in-demand of note.
There is an interesting set of lessons to be learned from this latest research. Organisations are keen to develop their digital talent and sense an urgent need to do so, but feel themselves to be very short of the staff to do so and also incapable of developing these skills with training. Their employees also feel threatened by new developments in the skills market but even more pessimistic about the training on offer by their employers.
If the report is good news for anyone, it is that data scientists, cybersecurity engineers, and tech corporate training consultants should be in demand over the near future.
