Skills Shortages in the IT Sector

While vacancies are flowing, the real challenge lies with finding candidates with cutting edge skills for the constantly evolving sector.

Employers demand for data management analysis, user-friendly websites, business transformation and increased security is shaping recruitment within the IT sector. From a recent article in ‘Recruiter’, Andy Almond (Partner for the UK and Ireland for Computer Futures and SThree) stated as organisations start to overhaul how they interact with suppliers there is an increased demand for user interface and user experience professionals to ensure websites and e-commerce processes are engaging and easy to use.

The article outlines the main challenges businesses are facing and the consequential effect on IT recruitment demand:

• Businesses require their systems to become more customer focused in todays marketplace, the demand for a more effective user interface has increased the need for these skillsets.
• Additionally, organisations require managing and storing a larger amount of data. Many businesses choose to use cloud-based technology to handle the amount of data being processed and produced. This type of technology can be altered to fit the company requirements and this drives demand for data analytic and data scientist roles.
• Also in demand are marketing analytics and econometrics professionals who trawl through data to identify patterns, trends and buying behaviours.

Shortages of skills are greatly felt in the IT sector. As new technology is added so frequently, it takes a degree of time of time for there to be candidates with the right level of skills that are required. It is becoming increasingly important for employers to be proactive in their hiring processes – engaging with schools and universities to create a talent pipeline and promote IT as career path.