The COVID 19 pandemic and its associated chaos have created a situation where nearly all businesses, irrespective of domain, have felt the need to offer digital-friendly services for their customers and employees.

While the path to digital was on the minds of almost every business leader, the pace at which businesses moved to realize their digital ambitions accelerated rapidly owing to the pandemic. McKinsey found in a survey of top global executives that several of them have jumped forward in their digitization efforts by as much as 3 to 4 years in a matter of just months.

Digital transformation opened the door for sustainable and profitable customer engagement channels that are likely to retain customer loyalty even in the post-pandemic world. Employees got access to automated workflows and digitized processes that improved accessibility, performance, and responsiveness.

While digital is creating opportunities on one side, it is also bringing in a new wave of challenges for enterprises. Chief among them is getting the right talent to help them in building their dreams in the digital economy.

Studies on recruitment trends in the IT space showed that 73% of IT leaders are struggling to fill open roles for technology specialists. Add to this, the complexity of hiring and maintaining a large technology workforce when your core business is not tech. Businesses find it hard to finalize the exact range of experience or market-specific tech domain proficiency, they must hire to help with a particular business initiative and what is the career roadmap for such hires.

As businesses expand their digital outreach by leveraging a slew of emerging technologies, here are 5 skills that they will find hardest to hire:

Data Analytics and Data Science

The digital economy has expanded into nearly every walk of life. From a digital perspective, data is the new oil and the fundamental building block of every great digital experience. Enterprises must figure out ways to get their business systems to talk data, capture this data, and model it to solve plenty of challenges and discover new ways of winning customer love. The task of handling and playing with data is a science in itself and this is why data science is a hot skill in the job market today. Data scientists are required in industries ranging from consumer durables to telecom and utilities. The larger the digital footprint of an organization, the bigger will be the scope for data scientists to make an impact in the workplace. However, the rising demand for data scientists from nearly every sector will result in a fierce battle to hire and onboard the best data scientists available.

User Experience

Digital channels are fast becoming the de-facto choice for customers in sectors ranging from education to entertainment. However, one of the biggest challenges that digital channels face is delivering the most aligned user experience for a visitor, every time they interact with the digital channel. The challenge is to create an elevated user experience that is intuitive, intelligent, elegant, and uber-functional. To focus on user experience and related functionalities like usability, enterprises will have to seek the services of front-end engineers to ensure that core usability is never compromised and always up and running.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

AI and ML have transitioned from their initial days of concepts and experiments. Today, they power major functionality in businesses ranging from accounting to customer experience. However, the wide range of technologies, frameworks, and supporting ecosystems for AI today may prove to be confusing for enterprises to address. It’s becoming harder and harder to find talented engineers for this purpose.

Cloud and DevOps

By 2025, Gartner expects more than half of all key enterprise IT spending will shift to the cloud.  More of the core business’s critical applications and digital infrastructure will be built and deployed on the cloud. Hence cloud-native application development skills will be in high demand. Additionally, there will be a strict emphasis on achieving mastery in deploying and managing cloud-based enterprise services which translate into more demand for DevOps as well.

Cybersecurity

Nearly USD 10.5 trillion will be lost every year globally by 2025 because of different cyber threats. Ensuring all critical business systems and data and information management systems are protected from threats will become a primary goal for all enterprise leaders. Hence skills such as cybersecurity, risk control, risk assurance, threat mitigation, SoC management, data management, etc. will find the job market to be flooded with opportunities. The combination of scarcity of skills and overwhelming demand will make it hard to find and retain talent in these areas.

Emerging opportunities in the digital space will always create a constant demand for tech talent. However, at different points in time, the skills needed or the experience desired will undergo evolutionary changes or upgrades. The problem for enterprises is that building an in-house tech team will require constant investment and create resource utilization problems. This is when businesses turn to a credible digital partner like Trinus. Our staffing service helps you get access to the most competent technology specialists with the desired experience level to staff the key technology positions within your operations. This partnership comes with the advantages of an off-shore and on-shore mix of resources combined with the benefits of dedicated training and learning programs to keep our consultants market-ready. Talk to us to know more.