Cloud computing – the UK’s most sought after IT skill
About a month ago, an IT recruitment firm, Robert Half, published the results of a study it had conducted into the skills sought by enterprise IT departments. For the past few years IT security, software development and project management have topped the list, corresponding to recent skills shortages.
About a month ago, an IT recruitment firm, Robert Half, published the results of a study it had conducted into the skills sought by enterprise IT departments. For the past few years IT security, software development and project management have topped the list, corresponding to recent skills shortages. This year cloud computing knowledge and experience was deemed to be the most valuable skill.
The study found that CIOs and IT Directors rated cloud knowledge as most valuable in terms of career path and advancement, followed by IT security (just two percentage points behind) project management, virtualisation, network administration and engineering, mobile and application development (a full 12 percent behind cloud knowledge), database management, C# development, business intelligence and Java development.
Supporting this, the research also showed that nearly half of CIOs and IT Directors planned to hire additional staff to support cloud initiatives. In addition, research firm IDC published a white paper at the beginning of this year, “Climate Change: Cloud’s Impact on IT Organisations and Staffing”, where it stated that 1.7 million cloud-related jobs globally could not be filled last year and that demand for cloud skilled IT professionals will grow 26 percent annually until 2015.
The IT industry has witnessed an enormous increase in the number of cloud computing initiatives being rolled out and no doubt this is fuelling demand. The Robert Half study points to 82 percent of organisations already implementing or planning to implement in the near future, cloud projects.
In attempt to bridge the cloud skills gap, as well as hiring expert staff, IT directors are training their existing IT staff to improve their cloud skills, bring their current IT teams up to speed on cloud skills.
Another survey, this time from CWJobs.co.uk, revealed that while nearly two in three IT professionals have intentions of building up the skills which could help with a career in cloud only 29 percent knew how to go about building the right skills.
So it seems that while the IT industry has now built some great momentum behind cloud computing, this will be lost, giving other countries a competitive edge, if employers, vendors, education institutions and training companies don’t pull together to improve cloud skill training, making it more accessible.
