Firms bemoan lack of cloud skills

Though some treated lack of skills in marketplace as opportunity to train up internal staff

Many firms are struggling to recruit people with the right skills to help them deliver on their cloud strategies.

That's one of the themes to come out of Computing's Cloud and Infrastructure Summit, held recently in central London.

David Stanley, head of platform delivery at the Trainline, explained that finding people with the right skills has been "painful".

"Trying to hire good sysadmins and developers is painful," said Stanley. "Skills is a big problem. It's just very hard to find people with the right background and experience, because there are a limited number of tech companies that do what we do. So we try to hire people with the right attitude, then put them in teams with the right skills."

He added that his organisation sent 150 staff on an AWS course across five months, in an effort to train up existing employees since the market was unable to supply new hires with the right skillset.

Simon Hazlitt, co-founder and relationship manager at financial services firm Majedie Asset Management, found similar problems.

"We didn't hire anyone," began Hazlitt. "In financial services, you tend to find people who are immensely capable with numbers, so they're typically very good with Excel."

He explained that these people with innate mathematical skills are excellent at spotting patterns, and so will perform better than the average IT person when it comes to gleaning meaning from data.

"A tech person might be looking for a number between zero and 10, but an experienced person will know it has to be seven, then eight next week, and three and a half the week after, because they understand the processes that sit beneath. People need to undestand the significance of the information that's presented to them, that makes for a more rapid development path."

Martin King, co-founder of education services provider InspireNshare, also had to rely on in-house staff to deliver on his cloud strategy.

"We had to support our cloud move in-house," said King. "And our staff were keen because they wanted to acquire that skillset. For us cloud development is not that demanding, as we can use APIs and common languages to lighten the workload."

Elsewhere at the event, another theme emerged that a mix of cloud environments was popular as a strategy, rather than going exclusively into public or private setups.