During Computer Weekly’s first CW500 meeting of 2016 CIOs named their top trends for 2016. Amongst them we find building new skills and the cloud.
The business world is changing and digital skills are becoming more and more important. Even for businesses that weren’t really relying on the web or computers. Automation and robotics are getting into more and more tasks and are creating different types of jobs.
This means that slowly, but surely more and more people need to acquire the skills needed to be able to do their jobs. There are more and more jobs popping up that didn’t exist just 10 years ago. “It is creating a challenge because you can’t grow the talent quickly enough to fill the jobs that are being created so fast. A lot of software is going into that and we need software developers who know what they are doing in that area. These streams of talent don’t exist – they’re not formally trained in our institutions. You have to compete. You can’t grow it and you can’t train it, and there’s a limited supply”, says Albert Ellis, chief executive of recruitment agency Harvey Nash.
At the same time, more companies are relying on tech services. Even small stores see the benefits of using cloud services for their data. Companies of all sizes also grow increasingly dependent on cloud services and need people who can work with them. IDC research points that 66% of businesses are in the process of digital transformation. Many organizations still think this means a new site and a mobile app, but they are quick to find out that it means moving your business to the cloud for example or involving tech and software across their organizations. So you need capable people who can do that and then maintain it.
“Cloud is definitely seen now as a big innovator, even in 2016,” says Spencer Izard, research manager at IDC, “It means organizations can tap into compute power and capability they only used to be able to get if they were a large organization with lots of data centers and a large IT footprint.” He also adds that big data, data integration, analytics will continue to be amongst the companies top realized new priorities. Digital securities and privacy technologies also grow increasingly more important.
Going further, the experts say that more and more companies will need a Chief Digital Officer (CDO). Currently only 6% of the top 1500 companies around the world have such a position, a PwC study shows.
All of this may seem a big frightening and challenging, especially for companies that haven’t had much reliance on digital tech before. But it’s not that scary. Yes, there is a huge lack of qualified people to do these jobs at the moment, but you can help create them. All you have to do is know what you need and then train and certify your employees to be able to do it. The CourseDot marketplace is here to help you find the right courses.
Image credit: Flickr (CC) / hackNY.org