With technology acting as a leaven transforming businesses and impacting all job roles, these two findings from a recent study by EY and iMocha hardly raise eyebrows. Eighty-one percent of the organisations are faced with a shortage of “power user or developer tech” skills. And two, 28% of the organisations feel the necessity of revamping tech skills for a third of their talent base by 2025.
The study — ‘Tech Skills Transformation – Navigating The Future Of Work In 2025 And Beyond’ — notes 19% of the organisations have a skill taxonomy in place. Skill taxonomy denotes a structured system to categorise and organise various skills and competencies according to job roles. And 43% of the organisations have conducted skill benchmarking at the employee level.
“The adoption of skill taxonomy and benchmarking is a clear indicator that the increasing complexity of tech skills is making it necessary for leaders to reconstruct their talent acquisition, development and management strategies,” says Amit D Mishra, founder and CEO, iMocha.
The study pegs the global tech talent pool at over 26 million people — 65% of them are in software engineering roles, followed by 27% in IT roles and 8% in business app-related roles.
As per the study, application developers and business app users are in high demand — 76% and 62% respectively, as stated by the organisations surveyed. Independent software vendors (ISVs) and IT/ITeS are the largest supply pool of tech skills with the United States, India, European Union and the United Kingdom accounting for nearly 56% of the total talent pool.
Broader job roles
Venkatesh Radhakrishnan, partner, workforce advisory, EY India, reveals a power software developer is now expected to have end-to-end knowledge straddling design, architecture, development, deployment and maintenance.
Similarly, a ‘power’ IT engineer is expected to have expertise in the use of multiple tools along with AI-based tools for IT support, reporting, diagnosis, monitoring and customer management.
In a press release, Alpana Dutta, partner, People Advisory Services, EY India notes with technology skills proving valuable across job roles, functions and industries, it is not surprising that 62% of the employers believe that 5-15% of their talent base will require skills transformation in the next two to three years, with 33% of the employers estimating that 15-35+ % of their talent base will require this upgrade.
For HR leaders, enabling tech skills transformation will necessitate taking a multi-disciplinary approach, with a focus on developing granular, real-time intelligence into an organisation’s skills inventory. We also expect to see increasing investment in skills intelligence platforms, Alpana says.
The study had respondents from India, the US, the UK and EU representing a range of industries, including IT/ITeS (41%), BFSI (29%), Telecom (9%) and independent software vendors (16%).
