81% Of Organisations Are Experiencing A Shortage In Skilled Tech Workers

EY and iMocha have released a report titled “Tech skills transformation – Navigating the future of work in 2025 and beyond.” The report is a comprehensive study on how technology skills are increasingly integrating across all job roles, beyond traditional IT roles. The study assesses the topic from three lenses – in-demand tech skills across domains, the organizational impact of tech skills transformation, and organizations’ response to tech skills transformation.

The report indicates that a significant majority, or 81 per cent, of surveyed organisations, acknowledged encountering a shortage in “power user or developer” tech skills. Merely 19 per centof the organisations reported having established a skill taxonomy, while 43% had conducted skill benchmarking at the employee level. There is an estimated global tech talent pool of over 26 million people with 65% in software engineering roles followed by 27 per cent in IT roles and 8 per cent in business app-related roles.

Speaking about the report, Amit D Mishra, Founder and CEO, iMocha, said, “Job roles and skill needs are changing faster than ever. In this report, we discovered 28% of the leaders believe they will have to revamp tech skills for a third of their talent base by 2025 to stay competitive. The adoption of skill taxonomy and benchmarking is a clear indicator that the increasing complexity of tech skills is necessitating leaders to reconstruct their talent acquisition, development, and management strategies.”

Nonetheless, the shortage of future tech skills is expected to arise from the high demand for application developers and business app users, as indicated by 76 per cent and 62 per cent of the surveyed organizations, respectively. The report highlights India's standing as one of the top tech talent markets, with a market share of 16 per cent, putting it on par with Europe's 16 per cent and the USA's 20 per cent.

Adding to it, Alpana Dutta, Partner, People Advisory Services, EY India said, “It is clearly evident that technology skills are seen as valuable across job roles, functions, and industries. With the increasing usage of different tools, the complexity of skills needed across various functional areas (software engineering, IT, and business application power user) is also increasing. Hence it is not surprising that 62 per cent of employers believe that 5-15 per cent of their talent base will require skills transformation in the next 2-3 years, with 33 per cent of employers estimating that 15-35+ per cent of their talent base will require this upgrade. For HR leaders, enabling tech skills transformation will necessitate taking a multi-disciplinary approach, with a focus on developing granular, real-time intelligence into an organisation’s skills inventory. We also expect to see increasing investment in skills intelligence platforms.”

The report's findings are based on in-depth interviews with industry leaders from various sectors, ensuring that multiple industries were represented from across geographies like India, the US, the UK, and EU. Respondents came from a range of industries, including independent software vendors (ISVs) (16%), IT/ITeS (41 per cent), BFSI (29 per cent), and Telecom (9%).

It was discovered that the ISV (Independent Software Vendor) and IT/ITeS (Information Technology enabled Services) industries prove to be the biggest tech talent incubators accounting for almost half (more than 47%) of the resources. Other major industries that incubate tech talent include BFSI (Banking Financial Services and Insurance) (10%), logistics and supply chain (8 er cent), and telecom (5 pe cent).

The holistic nature of the surveyed organizations and the identification of key challenges clearly highlight that there is a steady and sector-agnostic shortage of adequate tech skills especially on the application development and usage fronts. 28 per cent of companies surveyed have opined that the tech skills transformation of about 35 per cent of their teams would become critical to retain a competitive edge by 2025.

Half of these companies are from India and the other half are from the UK/EU. Further, about 75 per cent of UK/EU respondents stated that there are tech-skills gaps in business app user roles whereas 60 per cent of the Indian and 50 per cent of US respondents acknowledged this gap.