Disrupt or be disrupted: firms need to quantify their IT skills gap says Pluralsight

It's hard to plan for the future if you don't know what talent you have

What is your strategy to rescale the workforce today to meet the needs of tomorrow?

This is a question posed by Iain Bartlett, enterprise account director at technology learning platform Pluralsight, addressing delegates at Wednesday's Cloud Live event organised by Computing. In an age where technology is a key differentiator in almost every sector, it's a question that requires urgent answers.

With technology being the driver of innovation, and with innovation essential for business survival, the need for well-qualified and skilled developers, architects, operations people, security experts, networking specialists and cloud managers has never been greater, and yet the supply has never been so stretched. For example, there are half a million unfilled technology job vacancies in the US, and by 2022 Europe will face a predicted shortage of 350,000 IT security staff.

The pace of technological change increases inexorably, but it's not just the pace of change it's the unpredictability of where that change is leading, which means that organisations need to be fleet of foot and their employees likewise. The loyalty of customers is diminishing and a single poor user experience could be enough to lose them forever. It's the familiar theme of disrupt or be disrupted.

"Digital transformation is pervasive in every sector," Bartlett said. "Companies need to take their corporate strategy and directly align it to their technology strategy and keep it moving forward."

The need to keep on top of the technology at a time when experienced staff are expensive or hard to find is problematic. Bartlett quoted a survey finding that 80 per cent of CEOs find attracting and one of their biggest challenges. The first step towards solving it is to understand the problem, he added.

"Organisations are struggling to understand what their skills are and what the shortages are today. If you don't have the ability to know where the gaps are how are you going to know where to drive the changes forward?"

Technology skills typically have a two-year half-life, meaning that what developers know today will be outdated in only two year's time.

"If your competitors can learn an important new technology faster than you then you're in danger of being disrupted," said Bartlett.

It's important to build to compare skills in-house with the projected need 12 to 36 months into the future. Pluralsight provides a way for individuals and teams to be tested on their skills and aptitudes.

"If you can identify those two areas [skills of individuals and teams], boil them down and quantify them you got a really good starting point to achieve something. If you can have an inventory of technical skills and the ability of your staff to deliver across the organisation on a dashboard you're in a much better position to see if your business is going to be sustainable or not," Bartlett said.