IT trends require an upskilled workforce

Australia is facing a 100,000-person skills shortage in the IT industry over the next five years.

Cloud technology, data-driven business, connectivity and automation are among the major business technology trends that will continue to dominate the market in 2016, according to the findings of CompTIA’s recent ‘The International State of the Channel’ survey report.

As a global IT industry association, CompTIA keeps close track of the market forces that shape the business technology landscape and, as anyone who has their finger on the pulse of the industry will tell you, these trends come as no surprise.

What might come as a surprise is how these trends are affecting the IT skills pool in the Australian market.

Increased cloud migration, for example, is leading to big changes in how organisations work. Using cloud infrastructure for certain business processes or IT functions often requires an entirely new set of skills for businesses to either build internally or obtain through new hires.

Meanwhile, new technology solutions that are implemented internally also often demand additional skills among the existing workforce. Either way, when an organisation decides to incorporate new and emerging technology into its operations, it is faced with the challenge of also obtaining the skills needed to use the technology to its full potential.

With Australia already facing an IT skills shortage, the influx of this new technology is likely contributing to the widening of that skills gap, as the rapid influx of the new skills needed to control and use it outpaces the rate at which existing professionals can retrain or recent graduates can fill new roles. There are predictions that there will be a 100,000-person skills shortage in the IT industry over the next five years.

Compounding the skills shortage issue is the tendency for many new IT graduates to require additional training and certification to fill the increasing number of technology roles that are opening up in the market, leading to a lag in replacements to fill vacancies.

However, there are some reasons to be optimistic.

Students who are now in school or undertaking tertiary education are digital natives. There is an enormous potential among these individuals, who will comprise the next generation to enter the workforce, to have the knowledge and skills needed to work with the technology emerging right now.

If this innate potential can be capitalised, perhaps by getting today’s students interested in being tomorrow’s IT professionals, the skills gap will begin to shrink and hopefully disappear altogether.

Given that youth unemployment is on track to hit 20%, a push from industry and the government to support IT and technical skills at school and university can help the next generation fill the skills gap and create more employment opportunities for Australia’s youth population.

CompTIA is focused on addressing this key issue through a number of different programs, including supporting the Young ICT Explorers program, a non-profit initiative encouraging students to create ICT-related projects, and Dream IT, which aims to show women and girls how the IT industry can be a great place for them to make a career.

Once the skills are available, new technology can be used optimally by organisations, letting them tap into the potential offered by the likes of cloud technology, data-driven business, connectivity, automation and other emerging infrastructure increasingly used by business.