Why the tech talent shortage isn't going away, and what to do about it

Brace for another 12-18 months of tech talent shortages, Gartner's Mbula Schoen tells CRN

Tech vendors and their channel partners should brace for at least another 12-18 months of tech talent shortages, but should be looking inside their own organisations to plug the gap.

That was the message from Mbula Schoen, senior director analyst at Gartner, as she told CRN that demand for cloud architects, cybersecurity specialists, app developers and other tech roles will continue to outstrip supply, even as the big tech firms continue to slash staff.

The mass tech layoffs continued this week as Amazon announced it would cut another 9,000 staff, including some from within its AWS public cloud arm.

That followed on from a second round of job cuts at Meta last week.

'Still an employee market'

This influx of talent onto the market won't be enough to nullify a tech skills shortage made worse by the need to digitally transform in the wake of the pandemic, Shoen said.

"Gartner's position is we're going to experience that crunch for the next 12-18 months before we start to see it easing," she said.

The 1,600 IT workers quizzed in Gartner's Q4 2022 Job Opportunity Barometer - which has measured employees' perception of the availability and quality of other employment opportunities in their current locations, industries and function since the start of the pandemic in 2020 - remained relatively optimistic about their roles (see below).

"The bottom line is that it is still an employee market right now," Shoen said, adding that the shortages apply as much to tech vendors and channel partners as they do to CIOs.

"Even though we don't look into that vertical [vendors and IT services providers] specifically, these organisations are going to market for the same talent.

"They're looking for cloud architects, IT security, application developers, product managers, enterprise architects, AI and data analytics. Those are the skills that are in very high demand and short supply."

Most big tech layoffs have centred on business rather than IT functions, Shoen (pictured below) said, stressing that 54 per cent of workers laid off at Meta had been in business positions.

"Yes, [the layoffs] are bringing more tech talent onto the market, but it's not significant enough to make a difference," she said.

"The compensation for those specific skills I mentioned will remain high, and we haven't seen compensation go down."

Overall, the big tech firms still employ more people than before the pandemic hit in 2020, Shoen added.

Retraining tech-adjacent workers

So how should hiring managers in the tech channel respond?

One solution is to identify workers in tech-adjacent functions such as finance, and repurpose them as all-out techies, Shoen said.

"We can't expect CEOs and tech leaders to sit and wait for 12 months because they have to go ahead with their digital transformation efforts," Shoen said.

"You might have someone sitting in finance who has a maths degree and is a hobby coder at home.

"Previously the opportunities in IT were blocked because we had very specific requirements. But we're seeing CIOs casting the net wider and saying ‘we're going to invest a lot more in our upskilling and reskilling; we need to look internally and understand whether we have competencies that, with investment and upskilling, we can bring into it projects'."