According to a study by SoftwareOne, the lack of IT skills is becoming a global problem. This puts a strain not only on the IT teams, but on the entire organization.

98% of companies worldwide admit that there is a shortage of IT specialists. SoftwareOne came to these impressive figures after surveying 500 business managers, including a hundred from the Benelux countries. Companies try to keep up with the latest technologies, but updating skills occurs more slowly than innovations coming to market. This creates a shortage of skilled workers that has devastating consequences for the entire company. A third of companies say this is significantly impacting their financial goals.

Due to the shortage of skilled workers, digital transformation projects are delayed by an average of five months. The problems can be of various types. 43 percent of respondents said their organization had difficulty staying on top of security and compliance, 41 percent had issues with application performance and outages, and 38 percent lacked KPIs for delivering new innovations to the organization. A third even said they would have to limit their cloud usage entirely.

IT teams under pressure

Of course there is also the human influence. Almost all IT decision makers (98%) believe their team has been negatively impacted by the lack of cloud talent, while 62 percent say their workload has increased in the last 12 months. That’s why IT experts are looking for other employment: The study warns that companies could lose up to a quarter of their IT staff if the skills gap is not closed.

Scaling capabilities within the organization and recruiting new IT talent will be critical in 2024. Generative AI can create new opportunities but also new challenges. More than sixty percent of respondents say their organization currently does not have sufficient knowledge and skills to implement generative AI.

The majority of organizations are positive about the future. 87 percent expect to be able to close the skills gap within five years. Nine out of ten see managed cloud solutions as an important tool. The latter number is not surprising since SoftwareOne itself offers cloud software and support.