PureGym's Andy Caddy: The top IT concerns for 2023

Inflated salaries, the skills gap and cybersecurity

PureGym's Andy Caddy: The top IT concerns for 2023

Technology is a fascinating market; every year brings new tools, opportunities and challenges. Sometimes they're the same thing.

Andy Caddy, CIO of low-cost fitness chain PureGym, believes some of 2023's challenges will be specific to this year, while others are the type that come up again and again.

Salary inflation

IT professionals have been in low supply and high demand for years, and since 2020 salaries have climbed so fast that the market is struggling to support pay demands.

"We've been through a couple of years of lots of digital growth coming out of Covid and it was getting crazy. You only had to talk to any friendly recruiter to hear horror stories of people leaving for £20,000, £30,000 jumps in salary - just crazy stuff."

While Caddy doesn't begrudge staff asking for fair recompense, he is concerned for the UK tech scene's long-term health if the trend continues.

"It's clearly some sort of bubble: it can't go on like that forever, and you worry where you're going to end up. You're doing to end up with graduates on ninety grand. It's kind of crazy, it's not sustainable...

"What that means is that everyone then starts looking abroad. You start saying, ‘In a world where people are fully remote, why don't I just go to Bulgaria or Hungary?'

"There are some brilliant talent pools out there, but it's a bit of a shame for our UK talent. They're pricing themselves out of the market if they're not careful."

The MES IT Leadership Network is a place for CIOs to discuss their top concerns with their peers. Click here to find out more.

PureGym's Andy Caddy: The top IT concerns for 2023

Inflated salaries, the skills gap and cybersecurity

Image
A woman sits under a palm tree while she works on her laptop
Description

Remote work

The ability to work from anywhere has been a breath of fresh air for some firms, but others are pushing to get people back in the office. Still others have embraced hybrid working, acknowledging that while people should have their freedom, some things are best done face-to-face.

Caddy "totally understands and supports" remote work, seeing little point in engineers coming to the office just to put headphones on and ignore their surroundings for eight hours. But he does have concerns with the trend that go beyond the possibility of boosting the job market in Eastern Europe.

His first, a common one across the industry, is collaboration. While tools like Zoom, Teams and Google Meet are great, "it's still hard to beat getting six people in a room around a whiteboard. There's a lot of that dynamic that goes missing."

Video conferencing works for the day-to-day tasks, but when it comes to strategic decisions relying on these tools is effectively hobbling yourself.

It isn't only senior leaders and managers who are impacted by the preference for teleconferencing. Andy's second concern is for new industry entrants: young people just coming into the industry, who rely on knowledge transfer through osmosis.

Just sitting in the same office having casual conversations and listening to colleagues as they work is a huge benefit to new starters - a lost opportunity if they sit at home four or five days a week.

"Is that really a great experience if I'm sitting in my little office or bedroom at home? How do I get those moments where someone gives me a bit of a feedback or a hand on the shoulder, or those moments where someone's observed something and comes up and says, ‘You know what, there's a way of doing that better?'"

It's a topic close to Andy's heart, because it (almost) directly affects his own family. His son, he says, "will forever be that generation that got given grades because they didn't take exams."

"I worry about this for the next three or four years, this generation of workers coming in. ‘Oh, you're the one that came in when we all had to work at home, who aren't quite as good as the ‘real ones''."

It's a cultural issue, and IT leaders will need to work with their teams to find a solution.

PureGym's Andy Caddy: The top IT concerns for 2023

Inflated salaries, the skills gap and cybersecurity

Image
A padlock on a computer keyboard
Description

Cybersecurity

Finally, and on everybody's mind, is the issue of security and defence. As a growing brand, PureGym attracts an increasing number of attacks but has a relatively small security team.

"You've got to find your own ways to do what you need to do to stay safe," says Andy. "Education, culture, ways of working, modernisation of architecture - all these sorts of things have to just become the day job. So that's always on my mind, because no CIO ever wants to stand in front of his board and talk about an issue."

The CISO position (and CIOs with security responsibilities) is moving away from being the go-to corporate scapegoat when something goes wrong, although we still often see security leaders taking the fall.

Even without blame lying squarely on IT leaders' shoulders, keeping the company safe remains their responsibility. As Andy points out, there are as many forms of defence as there are avenues of attack, and you can't afford to neglect a single one.

The next 10 months will present a wealth of opportunities as the IT market picks itself up again after the hard times of 2022. Even if the global economy continues to falter, IT can and will help businesses survive trying times. The days of technology being seen as a cost centre are, we hope, long behind us.

Computing is partnering with the MES IT Leadership Network to provide CIOs and other senior IT professionals a space to talk, network and discuss their concerns and opportunities for the year ahead. Find out more here, or click here to join.