Dive Brief:
- More than three-quarters of businesses have struggled to meet their IT talent needs, pushing most to upskill their current staffers, according to a Revature survey of 230 IT and HR decision-makers published last week.
- More than 4 in 5 decision-makers are concerned about finding technology talent this year, according to the report. Just over half of leaders plan to deploy upskilling and reskilling initiatives in their organizations.
- Companies are struggling to fill open roles, especially in machine learning, AI and generative AI, Revature found. Data and analytics, cloud and cybersecurity are other common pain points in talent attraction.
Dive Insight:
Employers ended last year with far less talent available than open roles in tech, a sign of the long-standing undersupply in critical technology categories.
In December, businesses had more than 430,000 active technology job postings, including more than 165,000 newly added roles, according to a CompTIA report published in January.
Enterprise AI adoption efforts, coupled with the relative recency of categories such as machine learning and generative AI, are fueling the mismatch between supply and demand. The accelerated pace of AI development is compounding the problem as new products and terms, including agentic AI, enter the fold.
"Whatever I learned in January becomes obsolete by March or April," said BlackLine CIO Sumit Johar. "Agentic AI is still so new, and people are still trying to deploy standard AI like copilot based solutions."
The swift developments in AI are creating a growing skills gap and the need for IT workforce training. Two-thirds of businesses plan to deploy programs focused on cybersecurity, software and data training this year, CompTIA found.
The push toward AI tools is also reframing how specific categories of IT operate. Software development will experience significant change in the coming years, as Gartner predicts the majority of developers will need to upskill by 2027 due to generative AI.
