As technology continues to rapidly advance, Ash Gawthrop, Chief Academy Officer at Ten10, outlines how organisations should close the tech skills gap.
The war for tech talent has never been greater, as businesses across the country are struggling to recruit and retain their IT staff.
Research from AND Digital reported that 81% of UK managing directors say a lack of digital skills is negatively affecting their company. Simply put, when companies don’t have the tech talent they need, their growth is stifled, and it takes them longer to achieve their goals.
We see organisations across the board struggling to recruit external tech talent due to several factors. For example, there is a lack of individuals available in the market with relevant tech skills, and many teams require technical skills that traditionally would have been present in more than one role.
Issues with permanent recruitment
Permanent recruitment is hard and risky. When recruitment teams ask their tech teams what they need them to know and do – this often results in a long laundry list of skills and experiences that they then dutifully try to find in the market matching all the skills – oddly enough, they often struggle to find people with exactly the right skills.
Assuming you can find suitable individuals, given the pace of change in tech, it’s highly likely that the skills you hire someone into a role, for now, will not be the skills they will need and will be used in two to five years in the role.
There are a lot of unknowns in the path to hiring; if you get it wrong, it’s disruptive, expensive, and time-consuming. When if the individual doesn’t work out, you’re right back to square one.
Bridging the tech skills gap with external sources
Another option is to bring in external consultants or outsource the work; this is expensive and may deliver what you want but may well cause disruption within your existing permanent teams.
Then, of course, you have the elephant in the room of what happens when they leave and ride off into the sunset; how do you maintain and run this yourself with the same team without the skills?
The solution: Upskilling existing staff
Is it all doom and gloom, then? It isn’t, and the two aforementioned solutions can and do work – but there is another way, and it may be right under your nose. Why spend months searching for prospects in a shrinking talent pool when you could upskill and reskill your existing staff?
There’s no challenge around cultural and personality alignment as they’re in the business already. They know your business, your people, your processes.
With increasing automation and more widely used AI throughout an organisation, many roles will potentially be redundant. Rather than solely relying on consultants, consider involving someone who has worked with your internal processes for years, knows all the ins and outs, and can provide valuable insights for automation.
Many organisations overlook this opportunity at their peril, dismissing individuals who are not in professional tech roles already as not being able to do them.
We sign up to the phrase, “Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not.” People joined your business through different avenues, but I’m willing to bet there was no testing to check their potential and aptitude and find the right role for them. Not everyone is able to do this, but testing individuals for attitude and aptitude for the tech roles instead of looking for a particular set of skills and dismissing anyone who doesn’t have them already is short-sighted.
How to upskill your team
But how do you do it, and can it work? In our experience, the answer is yes. Over the last decade, we have hired hundreds of individuals without experience or skills in tech and have trained and then turned them into BAs, developers, cloud engineers, etc. It’s not an easy path, but the potential benefits massively outweigh the risks.
You have individuals who are already bought into your organisation, and who are here for the long haul. Invest in those individuals, and that loyalty will be returned to you 100-fold.
Like in many walks of life, feeling wanted and valued is important. When employees are given opportunities to learn and develop new skills, they are more likely to feel valued and engaged in their work, leading to higher job satisfaction.
As employees gain new knowledge and abilities, they also become more confident in their ability to handle new challenges. Should organisations provide growth opportunities, you’ll be demonstrating a commitment to your employees’ professional development, building loyalty and reducing turnover rates.
Businesses should look to technology training experts to help them when it comes to upskilling and reskilling employees. Having the support of experts when it comes to doing something like this could be the difference between needing to join the battlefield of recruitment or not.
It may be a case where, depending on your needs, some experts are solely for helping retain your current team, and some may join you full-time. But it’s important to remember, when sourcing training experts to help with your organisation upskilling and reskilling, that they must offer holistic bespoke solutions based on your employees’ and organisations’ needs at that specific time.
