There’s a Digital Talent War Out There – And Organizations are Caught Napping
Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog
Did you know? A startup in China is offering hot-shot talent compensation in excess of $3 Million annually. Or that average employee cost at Google’s DeepMind division last year was $345,000. At the same time, valley hotshots continue to grow significantly scooping up smart talent– For eg, Google has nearly doubled its headcount since 2013. It also recently acquired an AI startup that’s barely 4-months-old. Facebook’s Instagram is hiring engineers and quantitative professionals from Wall Street. Across the world, the war for talent has never been more pronounced, and the pressure on companies and talent alike, never greater. For companies, the bigger challenge is that there is a significant gap emerging in the skills that’s required for them to be competitive, and the skills that their current employees have. The challenge of this digital talent gap is no longer just an HR issue; it is an organization-wide phenomenon that affects all areas of the business. Indeed, as our latest study, in partnership with Linkedin shows, the digital talent gap is worsening and is impacting both the competitive advantage and the progress of overall digital transformation.
This skills gap is not limited to technical skills, but it spans across soft and hard digital skills and organizations clearly do not appear to be doing what’s needed.
The Hard Thing about Soft Skills – Not everyone has them
Soft digital skills are an increasingly important characteristic of a well-rounded digital professional. Yet, what we observed across a wide variety of soft skills was that there is a uniform gap in need and proficiency in almost all soft digital skills.
Hard digital skills matter, now more than ever
The rise of new technologies, and their rapid proliferation across all functions of an organization has created the need for employees to shore up their skills in a variety of areas. Not just this, the nature of skills needed is dramatically changing across industries. For instance, if one wants to be a Chartered Financial Analyst, they now need to answer questions on Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, investment algorithms and more. Our research found that that organizations find a significant gap in hard digital skills across a variety of areas. The two skills most in demand, cybersecurity and cloud computing, are also those with the greatest talent gap.
Organizations appear to not be serious in addressing the talent gap
Employees appear to increasingly realize the imperative of skill upgradation. We found that over 29% of employees believe their current skill set will be redundant in the next 1-2 years. However, the same employees do not feel their organization’s skill upgradation programs are working. More than half of today’s digital talent say that training programs are not helpful or that they are not given time to attend. Close to half actually describe the training as “useless and boring”.
So, is all lost for organizations? How do leading organizations attract the brightest digital talent? What is this elite employee looking for? What are some best practices for identifying, hiring and retaining digital talent? For these questions and a lot more, read our full research report at https://www.capgemini.com/resources/digital-talent-gap.
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