Acquire New and Hot IT Skills
Buy, borrow, rent, or steal…well, don’t steal, just retrain and redeploy.
- The IT organization must acquire skills in the five trending areas - mobility, cloud, big data, social media, and security - within the next two years, or risk running a skills deficit.
- IT management must decide whether to retrain existing staff, hire new staff, contract, or outsource the work; poor decisions here will result in higher costs, delays, or inadequate quality.
- And, having chosen a particular direction, IT must get approval from management and move quickly to define skill requirements and find and select an appropriate candidate, often in a very competitive market.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Each organization has a preferred approach for addressing expertise shortages, but it can be a poor choice in certain situations. Keep your options open and select the best approach for each new requirement.
- There are key factors that will dictate how you find these skills. These factors are urgency, importance, novelty, scarcity, and cost.
- Hot skills have two unfortunate characteristics: everyone needs them, creating competition for scarce resources, and you likely don’t need all of them for the long-term, making permanent hiring often a poor choice.
- Info-Tech has identified ten IT roles within the five trends that we predict will come to the forefront within the next two years. Evaluate your needs and workforce to determine if your organization will require these roles and the length of time you will require them.
Impact and Result
- The organization can fill a vacant role more quickly, especially when the role is new and somewhat unfamiliar to management.
- The organization achieves the right balance of requirements for long-term capability with those for short-term need.
- The total cost of ownership of people services is less when an organization makes the right staffing choices.
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
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Our analyst calls are focused on helping our members use the research we produce, and our experts will guide you to successful project completion.
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Each call will focus on explaining the material and helping you to plan your project, interpret and analyze the results of each project step, and set the direction for your next project step.
Unlock Sample ResearchContributors
- Kevin Hohnbaum, IT Consultant, Fifth Gear
- Tina Iantorno, Manager IT Recruitment, TD
- Gavin Till, IT Director
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