Whether the IT skills gap is fact or fiction, visionary CIOs will have an influence on both talent management and the STEM education system.
1. Where is the “IT Skills” Gap?
The skills gap does exist. With pervasive IT, and new products, the need to innovate has to be balanced against reduced budgets and higher salaries. It means that IT has to do more with less. However, there is also the need for IT teams to be multi-functional. This requires quality training and constant monitoring for gaps. Mainly IT needs two types of talent, specialized IT generalists and IT specialists. IT indeed faces a few big talent challenges.
- IT Specialist: The first is pure technical skills. The highly technical programmers and engineers with deep knowledge and good experience who can handle the heads-down technical tasks are always hard to find.
- Specialized IT Generalist: The second, and, even more elusive, are people with the mix of technical, business, and leadership skills that are so critical for management and senior leadership positions in today’s IT organizations, as the pool of talent with business savvy and tech knowledge will be drawn dry quickly
- Emerging Technology Expert: Organizations do need folks with strong analytics skills to help IT and the business formulate, articulate, and answer the big questions that will reshape the business. Also, on a more technical level, organizations need the talent to help build and operationalize private/hybrid clouds.
- “Hard Skill” vs. “Soft Skill”: IT organizations have been over the last decades too focused on “hard” skills, not looking at the business reasons to do things and understand the business. As a service provider, IT should understand their customers, and their business, and provide innovative solutions and systems to support and make a business grow and gain competitive advantages, in other words, IT needs to have more talent with well-balanced hard skills & soft skills, and business literacy.
- STEM Education Gap: Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills gaps are present and growing: One study indicates 15-25MM unfilled jobs by 2020 because the US is not building a strong enough pipeline across both genders. Industry and education (K - 16) need to work together to encourage and fund young people to be interested in STEM careers. And education does not stop with a degree – an IT career takes a lifelong learning attitude.
2. “Skills Gap” is a Management and Culture Gap
Many academics, consultants, or industry gurus also argue the “skill gap” is not a real “skill gap,” but simply a “misunderstanding” or “miscommunication” gap.
- Purple Squirrel Syndrome: A Purple Squirrel is a creature that is nearly impossible to find and in staffing the term refers to a job specification with skill and experience requirements which are impossible, or nearly impossible to find. It’s not only a syndrome, but it’s also a mindset that spans many lines of business and it is dangerous, especially to innovation. They want a candidate to have all these specialties but seldom does it happen that way. Or simply the case of reticent employers who in a post-Recession economy that is growing slowly, are combining two, or three jobs into one position.
- Toxic Culture Ingredients: IT leaders always should ask themselves whether the workplace is healthy enough to attract the best and brightest. Either gender gap or generation gap, what are the root causes behind it? Is it caused by an out-of-date IT geeky image? or is it caused by toxic culture ingredients? A toxic workplace is usually identified by the lack of morale evidenced throughout the organization. Toxic characteristics may include Unethical conduct, unprofessionalism, unsatisfactory communication (in general), back-biting and rumor-mongering, obsessive favoritism, discrimination (age, racial, sexual, etc), harassment of any kind, etc. These are just some of the characteristics -- and the numerous possible combinations thereof -- would make a workplace more or less toxic.
- Out-of-Date Talent Recruiting/Management: There's misunderstanding or miscommunication (lost in translation) between IT talent request and HR's searching mechanism, also, there's a disconnect of IT's short-term staff needs and long-term talent perspectives; From IT talent management perspective, how to encourage IT professional in either category step out of comfort zone, continue to learn, continue to innovate, and update performance management practices by assessing both quantity and quality result objectively, to well define talent 2.0 in order to adapt to the fast-paced business new normal.
3. How to Mind the Gap
By understanding whether there’s a real IT talent gap or not, then, IT leaders can build a solid talent strategy in minding the gap.
- Shape a Learning Organization: Most people who enter this topic think of the transient skills of yesterday’s technology or the current product versions. They fail to grasp the root of the matter which is a person's ability to learn - quickly - and adapt prior knowledge to new experiences. Which by extension, applies to IT departments giving us the idea of a learning organization.
- Update Talent Competency Model: IT is transforming and moving to reach higher maturity at the digital age, IT talent needs to have both technical and business skills, and it should take preponderant importance in the coming years to make sustainable IT-Business relationships. Business-IT integration rather than an alignment of both is the key to success in companies. The value is not in the technology itself but in how to use it, having clearly understood how your business works and what its goals and strategy are. So a new IT role will have more a BRM approach rather than purely technical skills. The talent competency model & methodology need to be updated to well reflect such changes.
- Streamline IT Talent Pipeline: Whether IT can attract the brightest talent or not also depends on how effective the CIO is marketing his/her organization as a contributor to the corporation and society as a whole, IT knowledge life cycle has been shortened due to the changing nature of technology, thus, when assessing talent, more dynamic and balanced approaches are needed, instead of just searching for keywords, HR 2.0 will leverage the emerging talent pipelines and shift mindset for understanding talent with empathy, recognize raw intelligence through wise eyes. Forward-looking IT organizations need to discover and develop talent for tomorrow, rather than just hire for yesterday.
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