The survey findings appear in a report which focuses on how the battle for cloud talent has become well and truly joined. With the ominous subtitle of ‘from a cloud-native skills gap to a full-blown crisis’, there are plenty of warnings in place.
Ultimately, the biggest effect the report notes on organisations is around culture. With a skills gap, companies are challenged with an unwillingness to change pre-existing attitudes towards technology more than anything else. Other concerns are limited ability in adopting new technologies, as well as limitations in workforce productivity. “Unless veteran IT staff gain the core competencies to succeed in a digitally driven environment, organisations will not be able to confidently navigate their digital landscape,” the report noted.
Initiatives are taking place with regards to closing the skills gap. In October Cloud Academy announced the launch of two new products which aim to provide a greater picture of the jobs and skills landscape. Cloud Roster is a job roles matrix which analyses thousands of public job postings per week to provide trending tech skills, while Cloud Catalog provides a stack ranking of technologies based on developer community data.
The findings of this report may not be news to some executives. As this publication reported last month from a study by software provider Domo, three quarters (71%) of respondents said a lack of data access and skills could put their organisation at risk, but only one in five was willing to invest in training for existing staff or invest in recruiting employees with strong digital skills.
“Enterprises will need to invest in skill building and retraining programs to equip their internal teams to manage hybrid workloads effectively, given how expensive and difficult it is to hire the right external talent,” added Sher.