Technology Talent Shortage Threatens Businesses
64% of IT managers see talent shortages as a major threat to their business, according to a survey by Equinix.
Mass layoffs announced this week at major technology companies have shaken the sector. Meta will lay off 11,000 employees. And Twitter is expected to lay off about half of its 7,500-strong workforce.
However, while layoffs are always bad news, many companies are keeping an eye on the outcome of events, as the arrival of these employees on the job market is an injection of tech talent.
According to the ‘Equinix Global Technology Trends Survey 2022′, almost two-thirds (64%) of IT decision-makers in Spain believe that a shortage of staff with IT skills is one of the main threats to their business.
Thus, global respondents recognise that the speed of transformation in the technology industry is driving companies into fierce competition to find people with the right skills to meet current and future challenges.
The survey reveals that the most common concerns in Spain are the retention of current talent (52% of respondents), the changing expectations of workers around ways of working – hybrid, flexible, etc. – (39%) and the high number of job applications received from candidates with unsuitable skills for the role (38%).
The study also reveals that the most in-demand technology employees in Spain are cloud computing specialists (27%), IT technicians (25%) and those with AI/machine learning (22%) and security architecture (22%) skills. Equinix also found shortages in the Spanish market around data protection (20%), data analytics (17%) and security analytics (17%).
Globally, IT leaders expect technology skills gaps to remain similar in the future, with AI/machine learning skills shortages becoming increasingly prominent. In Spain, respondents predict that the main gap in 2025 will be in the skills of IT technicians and security architects.
Faced with such a situation, many companies are opting to train people from other areas to fill this talent gap. According to Equinix, 62% of companies surveyed worldwide say they are training workers from similar industries. In addition, 34% of them are seeking to strengthen their workforce with recruits from unrelated sectors, while in Spain these initiatives fall to 43% and 27%, respectively.
The most common sources of reskilled workers in Spain are administration and business support (40%), ahead of retail and wholesale trade and those returning to work after a period of absence (26%, in both cases). Equinix indicates that these re-skilled workers tend to help companies fill the technology skills gap in IT technician (56%), data analytics (30%) and cloud computing (29%) roles.
On the other hand, companies are also looking to recruit through higher education and apprenticeship programmes. IT managers in Spain report that the main ways of partnering with higher education institutions include offering internships for students and degree apprenticeships (both 35%), as well as running training programmes in collaboration with higher education institutions (31%).
