While incorporating innovative technology to sustain the business operations sounds like a good idea, it is difficult to implement since many employees struggle to acquire the skills required to operate on latest technology. Hence, CIOs should consider reskilling their IT to not only keep up with the evolving pace of technology but also to achieve their long-term growth.
Many organizations have increased their efforts to harness technology as they recover from the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The demand for tech talent will continue to grow as more organizations adapt their existing systems to go digital. According to Harvey Nash/KPMG’s 2020 CIO Survey, 65 percent of technology leaders from 83 countries cited hiring challenges as a major setback for the industry.
The surge in businesses embarking on transformation projects has resulted in an increase in demand for tech workers all around the world. CIOs across the enterprise landscape are scrambling to ensure that their employees brush up on the latest technologies and skills that support business agility.
For enterprises to truly grow in today’s dynamic technological environment, they need to have staff which is flexible, adaptable and willing to learn new skills in domains such as cloud software, cybersecurity and machine learning. As per Deloitte’s 2021 Global Human Capital Trend Report, the ability of employees to adapt, reskill and take on new roles can enable organizations to effectively navigate future disruptions. However, only 17% of respondents as per the report stated their workforce is ready to reskill, adapt and assume new roles. This showcases the disconnect between the priorities of leaders as well as the reality of how their companies support employee development.
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The acceleration of digital initiatives shows that CIOs should take a different approach to achieve a new and better outcome. Below are a few strategies that CIOs can leverage to develop more productive and agile IT workforces.
With cloud computing being incorporated into every facet of the business, CIOs should actively make an effort to embrace a cloud-ready environment. For IT teams, reskilling also helps to build a culture focused on ideas for developing credit-focused applications instead of simply maintaining, updating and patching servers.
CIOs should eliminate incentives that reward employees for achieving simple targets. They should also cultivate an environment where the tech teams work on building predictive analytics solutions that anticipate and align to market trends. Before embarking on any project, CIOs should innovate through a product-oriented lens and should be strategic about it.
In their effort to train their employees, many CIOs rush to hire third-party consultants who are mostly unfamiliar with their business operations and the work culture. Therefore, instead of looking outside the organization, CIOs should get in touch with their domain experts. Their familiarity with the infrastructure of the enterprise can help in creating better training programs that will enable employees to learn at a faster pace.
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With cybersecurity teams juggling several tools to keep the infrastructure secure, they need to learn basic scripting languages to build lightweight integration between different applications. This will enable them to understand the problems faced by software engineers at their organization and will have greater empathy for them. Moreover, taking such extra efforts will also strengthen the relationship between cybersecurity and IT teams.
Even though there’s no silver bullet to reskilling it teams, by following the principles of continuous learning CIOs can enable their staff to adapt to the continuously changing environment.
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Vishal Muktewar is a Senior Correspondent at On Dot Media. He reports news that focuses on the latest trends and innovations happening in the B2B industry. An IT engineer by profession, Vishal has worked at Insights Success before joining Ondot. His love for stories has driven him to take up a career in enterprise journalism. He effectively uses his knowledge of technology and flair for writing, for crafting features, articles and interactions for technology enterprise media platforms.
