HOW COMPANIES CAN WIN IN THE SIX TECH TALENT BATTELGROUNDS

Organizations worldwide are changing the way they do business with strategic digital transformation. AI and automation progressively solve organizational concerns around security, agility, efficiency, and reliability. As tech-driven operational changes become mainstream, existing job roles are transforming, and new roles are emerging.

Therefore, industry-wide digital transformation is being followed by a much-needed talent transformation. But this is giving rise to some significant challenges for tech talent management. Here are the seven main tech talent battlegrounds and how companies can tackle them.

According to a McKinsey survey conducted in three global markets with thousands of CIOs, these six tech talent challenges are emerging as the critical areas of focus for business leaders:

Stability, Agility, and Reliability in DevOps

DevOps is becoming more agile with stable environments and shortened operation times. New features are expected with uninterrupted continuity to support business expectations. Along with agile product life cycle management, organizations realize the need for microservices architecture and continuous integrations.

Changing Customer Experience Expectations

Businesses are increasingly trying to create a synchronized, omnichannel customer experience. At the same time, customers expect personalized design, utmost assurance of privacy, and relevant improvements in the UI/UX of digital touchpoints. To achieve this, organizations need scalable test-and-learn abilities, design thinking, predictive analytics, rapid prototyping, and automated testing.

Accelerated Improvement in Cloud

The next-gen cloud architecture capabilities are here and accelerating various business functions. Everything is faster and more efficient, from time to market services to solution scalability. Trained and experienced tech talent is required to manage multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architecture, data security, smart distribution, and edge computing.

Increasing Automation

Businesses are automating many processes relevant to their operations and business models. Development, testing, and deployment processes can be automated end-to-end to reduce errors and speed up completion. But to make this happen, tech talent is needed with expertise in RPA technologies, machine learning, AI-enabled analytics, cognitive AI, and quantum computing.

Flexibility and Speed With PaaS

PaaS or Platform as a Service operating model is gaining momentum as organizations find value in developing reusable code. New releases can be more flexible and faster with reusable code available as a product. Tech talent is required for life cycle management across various platform layers, managing industrial IoT, and vertical SaaS.

The Urgency of Cybersecurity & Protocols

Data privacy concerns are increasing as data breaches to the most secure data architectures are rising. As a result, organizations are prioritizing cybersecurity, standardization of protocols, and regulatory compliance. Tech talent is now needed for automated testing, zero-trust security, and compliance with data protection laws and practices. 

How Companies Can Win

These six tech talent battlegrounds are challenging due to a tech-talent shortfall and skill gap. To win in these, the following strategies are critical:

While it is important to bridge the talent gap as quickly as possible, it is equally essential to strategically recruit talent with the skills to match your company's current and future needs.

• Prioritize quality over quantity and hire the most talented techies to achieve your productivity goals.
• Include tech leaders and managers in the recruitment process to ensure skill assessment.
• Hire trainable individuals who can keep adapting to the changing tech-scape.
• Automate and expedite your recruitment process to close the talent gap faster.

Reskilling and Upskilling Existing Workforce

Source: https://www.aihr.com/blog/reskilling/

In addition to hiring new talent, you also need to start reskilling your existing workforce to keep pace with the digital transformation of your business. Furthermore, reskilling is much more economical and has better chances of success.

• Utilize existing training budget to focus on skill-specific, targeted training programs for tech-talent instead of broad learning programs.
• Offer short-term reskilling workshops or boot camps, followed by on-job application of acquired skills.
• Complement reskilling and upskilling with job role enlargement or redeployment of tech talent in new roles.
• Rope in non-tech talent as well for developing cross-functional and technical skills.

In conclusion, the industry's six most important tech-talent challenges can be tackled with strategic hiring and training measures. By budgeting for both and prioritizing the growth of quality tech talent, companies can win on these six battlegrounds and prepare a future-ready workforce.

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