Study: IT skills gap caused by new technology, lack of resources
Summary: Approximately eight in 10 businesses are negatively impacted because of a widening IT skills gap, according to a new study.
The fast-changing nature of technology and a lack of training resources are two of the biggest factors causing a significant gap in IT skills these days, according to a new study from CompTIA, a non-profit association covering the information technology industry.
The report, which surveyed 502 U.S. IT and business managers between December and January about the state of skills among the nation’s IT workforce, found that at least eight in 10 businesses were found to be negatively impacted because of this skills gap.
Some of the results included problems with staff productivity, customer service, time-to-market, and security.
Overall profitability also proved to be a sticking point for some, with at least 23 percent of the small businesses participating in the study admitting they felt a pinch because of an IT skills gap. Larger businesses and enterprises weren't far behind with 15 percent admitting the same setback.
So which skills are missing from a lot of these companies? Some of the most common shortcomings include handing emerging trends such as virtualization, process automation, and collaboration. But even core areas such as network security and updating equipment are also falling by the wayside.
Terry Erdle, executive vice president of skills certification at CompTIA, explained in the report that few organizations at where they want to be (or at least should be) when it comes to adequate IT skill levels:
Millions of businesses are clearly not where they want to be when it comes to optimizing their utilization of technology and in the skill levels of their IT staffs. Even modest improvements in these two areas would yield tremendous benefits in operational efficiencies, business productivity and economic growth.
Approximately six in ten organizations replied by promising to address IT skills gap challenges with training or retraining existing staff in areas where skills are lacking.
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Talkback
Companies have only themselves to blame.
So, we have an industry where your job could be outsourced tomorrow, companies want to hire you fully-trained but are unwilling to invest a penny by themselves, and CFO's mainly regard IT as an expense, not an enabler. Sounds like an internal problem to me.
Yup
This has been a problem longer than that
It's a hard one though
I volunteer and but equipment and software out of my own pocket.
Example. I played with Macs, but didn't know much about them. So I bought one and use it at home all the time. I put together ad Windows 2008 R2 server, found a friend with a MSDN subscription and they didn't use that software. I built a Ubuntu server to understand Linux, and I have VM on all of it...I have mini web servers at home (Win/Linux) and I have all of it on my Mac. Cost me $'s but I have training platforms to play with and learn.
You couldn't be more right.
This being said, it is obvious that most companies dont understand the tools needed by IT staffs, therefore, training usually goes undone.
IT needs to be more understood by companies. They need to build stronger relationships with the technical staff. The lack of good technology resources is a result of bad business managment.
Works both ways
I disagree most emphatically
Lot of problems...
1. Get promoted out of direct technology work into Leadership! positions due to lack of career advancement in a direct tech role
2. Go contract, charge a truckload and take long breaks
3. Go get an MBA
The work is high-stress, the security is low, and management at big companies, against all available data, sees developers as a "commodity" cog that can be swapped in and out at will. Why would your proactive go-getters stick around for that?
I agree
No money for training...
No sense of balance here.
" You can't bill more hours through efficiency."
Upgrading service equipment and digital hardware has gone into the redirect of corporate management; and the latest in the suggested requirement for employees to take up their personal hand held devices for work related tasks.
Nothing new under the Sun.........
Yeah right. Translation: Approximately six in ten organizations think that outsourcing all of their IT operations to cloud providers and encouraging BYOD amongst their users, will eliminate the need for IT, and solve the problem permanently.
Anybody care to bet how many of those organizations actually think that?
Dishonest....
American companies will hire every 22-year-old tech student from Nepal and India. And yet they discriminate against native-born Americans and simultaneously complain that there are no suitable candidates here in the US. Well, where is the incentive for anyone in the US when, at 40, you're too expensive compared to a non-citizen kid just off the boat and the companies have NO loyalty to the domestic workforce? In the long run, you're better off becoming a plumber.
The "globally conscious" tech elite in the US look outward to the rest of the world (exclusively) and could not care less about the US or its citizens. What chance does someone over 40 have in retraining and trying to get hired in IT? None at all. No workforce is being built in America because no one cares about the workforce in America - not the corporations, not the government, not Bill Gates or other hyper-wealthy tech giants, NO ONE.
Umm.
Ummm indeed....
And, as I said, there is a supply of talent that is not being utilized because of age discrimination. Duh. Also, there are loads of people who worked in lending and mortgages who are smart enough to be retrained to be sys admins or whatever. You're sort of agreeing with me and yet trying not to because you'd rather call Americans fat and lazy. You seem a bit confused.
Bill Gates has a scholarship program that focuses more on racial characteristics than on funding and building a tech workforce. Well capitalized companies and hyper-wealthy tech titans are in a position to steer and build the tech capability of America's existing population, just like Ford once trained many thousands of skilled laborers and engineers. They aren't doing it for a number of reasons, the primary one being that they just don't care. They indulge in a faux-intellectual globalism that relieves them of any responsibility to the America that birthed them and, at the same time, justifies their employment of whoever in the world works for pennies.
If Gates, the Jobs estate, Warren Buffett and others spent some of their billions on academies teaching and certifying the specific skills they find lacking in the workforce, they'd have the staffing they need. They haven't done that and they won't do it because they would rather keep their money and hire Ramesh from Katmandu rather than stop knocking Americans, give something back to the country, and hire Mark from Cleveland.
IT is a lack of control
Power?
And at the end of the day HR departments won't let "expensive" IT pros to be hired. And everybody's a "computer expert", etc., etc.
Nah - companies are at fault. And high schools for having crappy science programs, and colleges for pushing "liberal arts" degrees...
Oh yes, that is us, Petty Power Hungry tinpot Dictators.
execs' usual baseless propaganda
CompTIA is yet another non-profit conspiracy of the world???s information technology (IT) executives.
CompTIA gets its funds, direct or indirectly, from advancing the interest of industry executives through its propaganda and educational programs, market research, networking events to aid executives in conspiring, professional certifications, and public policy lobbying.
CompTIA always assumes that there is a "skills gap" because it is in the interests of the IT executives to hold down the compensation of STEM professionals, especially bright, creative, knowledgeable, industrious US citizen STEM professionals.
Few executives are exactly or even very close to where they want to be with technology utilization, staff skill, compensation, pliability and flexibility of professionals' ethics. These differences are hampering executives' own desires for ever more real, inflation-adjusted compensation and power for themselves over others.
CompTIA and their member executives fail or refuse to precisely define "staff productivity", customer "service" and "engagement", security, and these alleged "skills shortages", in part because the executives don't really understand these "skills". The weak resistance from US professionals to privacy violation schemes, for instance, has barely slowed deployment of the executives' every wet-dream for grabbing and misusing other people's personal private information (CRM, HRMS, TMS/CMS/AMS, "social networking", digitizing and willy-nilly spreading individuals' personal private medical information around the globe and to government bureaubums, cross-linking information in the cloud, barraging people totally inappropriate ads instead of random ads...).
25% of executives of small firms, some of them unable to fly in the vast pool of US talent for interviews, to offer new-hire training and relocation, don't get all of the cheap, pliant talent with flexible ethics that they want. Similarly, 15% of the executives of larger firms, who refuse to consider what used to be the norm in investment in interviewing, new-hire training, relocation, and retained employee training and relocation, don't get anywhere near as much cheap, pliant labor with flexible/questionable ethics that they want.
Millions of executives are clearly not where they want to be when it comes to optimizing their abuse of technology.
Executives refuse to invest in core areas such as security, data storage, refreshing aging equipment, improving network infrastructure and disaster recovery and business continuity; and emerging areas such as business process automation (privacy violation), mobility (getting 24/7 work for 7/5 compensation), collaboration and virtualization, at the expense of their own guaranteed extravagant compensation. Only 57% of executives are even considering investments in education and training, inadequate though those investments may intentionally be.
As STEM workers develop new possibilities, executives, who do not understand them, are quick to declare that those who developed them are incapable of working in these new technologies.
STEM professionals have always had a strong propensity for life-long learning and skills enhancement, and executives have long abused STEM pros' eagerness to engage in autodidactic activities.