A leading cause of security breaches lies in a lack of employee skills and awareness, according to new research from Fortinet, and it’s an issue that’s plagued the industry for years.

In Fortinet’s 2026 Global Cybersecurity Skills Gap Report, more than half (56%) of security and IT leaders cited a lack of employee security awareness as a top cause of security breaches.

A similar number (54%) highlighted a lack of trained IT or security staff as a leading contributing factor on this front.

Speaking to ITPro, Melonia da Gama, director of training and learning programs at Fortinet, noted that this marks the third consecutive year in which the top cause of security incidents came from poor skills capabilities.

Indeed, it’s an issue that enterprises are failing to address despite obvious signs that threat actors are capitalizing on the problem by actively targeting staff.

“For the third year in a row, human skills, whether it be the IT or security teams, or the general security awareness of all your employees, has been the top concern for threats,” she said.

“And if you look at the top four attacks listed, they’re all targeted at the end-user, at the employees.”

According to Fortinet’s findings, the top four attacks reported by organizations over the last year included:

• Malware attacks (39%)
• Phishing attacks (36%)
• Web attacks (31%)
• Password attacks (30%)

These attack methods align consistently with previous iterations of the report, da Gama noted, and show that despite an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape, cyber criminals are still sticking with traditional techniques.

“Some of these simple attacks they have are still working on humans, because we’re not investing as much as we should in their skills and development,” she told ITPro.

The situation for enterprises is further exacerbated by the fact that many simply can’t find workers with relevant skills. Worse still, nearly half (49%) said they struggle to even get approval to bring on additional cybersecurity talent.

This flies in the face of what executives have told Fortinet repeatedly over the last few years - namely the fact that cybersecurity is now a mission-critical area.

More than three-quarters (73%) said cybersecurity is now a key priority for their organization, for example. Many, however, aren’t putting their money where their mouth is, with Fortinet finding that only 59% prioritize spending in this domain.

According to da Gama, Fortinet found that there’s a growing gap when it comes to business priorities and financial priorities. Put simply, boards are aware of the scale of threats, but they’re not quite willing to invest at the levels required.

The potential impact of this underinvestment is significant, Fortinet found. More than half (52%) of organizations reported that breaches now cost more than $1 million on average.

High stakes with AI in the equation

Poor skills capabilities come at a critical time for many organizations, particularly given many are ramping up AI adoption and deploying new tools and technologies.

AI brings with it an array of new considerations for IT and security leaders. It’s an enabler for employees, but it’s also widening attack surfaces and is even being leveraged by threat actors to supercharge attacks.

“Last year in our report, we said [AI] was an opportunity, obviously, to shore up our defenses really quickly,” da Gama told ITPro. “It’s a challenge, because we’re seeing even this year, the biggest challenge they have is how do we implement this within our organization – and it’s a threat.”

“The number one worry they have is AI,” she added. “Attacks that are leveraging AI, because we don't know what they're going to look like. They're getting better and better every day.”

Da Gama explained that many organizations are falling into the trap of “hanging our hats on technology and AI” while “forgetting about the people”.

Finding cyber talent was already a challenge, but when it comes to AI-related skills the situation is even more dire, according to Fortinet. Nearly two-thirds (60%) of respondents said their top recruitment challenge was finding cybersecurity professionals with experience in AI.

Meanwhile, 63% said they expect a great need for AI oversight and governance roles in cybersecurity teams over the next three years.

Efforts are being made to improve on these fronts, Fortinet found. The overwhelming majority (92%) of respondents said they plan to invest in AI-related security training or certifications over the next 12 months.

The same number said they’re willing to pay for employees to achieve certifications in a bid to boost their skills capabilities.

Attempts to source talent from traditionally underrepresented groups and through alternative talent pipelines are also accelerating, Fortinet found.

92% of respondents now use internships, apprenticeships, partnerships, or skills programs to attract talent from a range of demographics. Three-quarters also have dedicated recruitment initiatives targeting women, marking a positive increase compared to last year.

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Cybersecurity skills are in huge demand across the UK, yet despite this, pay rises for security professionals are few and far between.

That’s according to the 2026 Harvey Nash Tech Talent & Salary Report, which found more than three-quarters (77%) of cyber pros missed out on pay rises last year.

Indeed, almost three-times as many workers in roles spanning DevOps (60%), infrastructure support (60%), and machine learning (55%) received salary boosts last year, compared to cybersecurity practitioners (23%).

The recruitment firm said this raises serious questions about why enterprises are overlooking staff in a critical profession - and the outlook among cyber professionals paints a damning picture.

Broadly speaking, tech professionals in the UK rank among the most pessimistic in terms of pay rise expectations. Yet staff in the aforementioned areas all claimed they expect a salary increase in 2026.

By contrast, fewer than half (45%) of cybersecurity practitioners said they expect a pay rise this year.

Ankur Anand, CIO at Harvey Nash, said the data should be a “wake-up call” for enterprises that fail to adequately compensate workers.

“We’re asking cybersecurity teams to stand on the front line of business risk, yet too often we’re not matching that responsibility with the reward, progression, and operating environment that keeps people in the profession,” Anand commented.

“When pay lags the market, workload keeps rising and the role is seen as a blocker rather than an enabler, it’s no surprise that attrition starts to look like the path of least resistance.”

Pay up or expect attrition

Attrition could become a serious issue for enterprises, according to Harvey Nash. The study noted that almost half (48%) of cyber pros are looking to switch jobs within the next year, above the UK average (45%).

The figures from Harvey Nash come in the wake of similar findings from IANS and Artico Search’s 2026 Cybersecurity Talent Report, which found only 34% of cyber professionals plan to stay with their employer over the next year.

Declining job satisfaction, higher workloads, and a lack of regular wage progression were all cited as key factors behind this looming wave of attrition – and it could exacerbate existing talent shortages.

Cybersecurity skills shortages have been a long-running issue for businesses across the UK. Notably, research from Socura in January found that while the number of cybersecurity jobs have surged in recent years, organizations are still struggling with huge shortfalls.

Separate research from De Montfort University in August 2025 warned that continued skills shortages are placing UK firms at higher risk of attacks.

“If organizations want to reduce exposure and respond faster when incidents happen, they need to treat cyber talent as a strategic capability: valued, visible and supported by leadership,” Anand commented.

“The organizations that get this right won’t just retain their best people – they’ll build trust with customers, regulators and their own boards.”

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While 2024 saw a surge in layoffs, budget cuts, and hiring and promotion freezes, the economic conditions hitting cybersecurity teams appear to be levelling off.

A new report from ISC2 shows that budget cuts across the industry fell by one percentage point to 36% this year, with layoffs also dropping by one percentage point to 24%.

However, while budget cuts are slowing down, a continued lack of budget is still a key hurdle for security leaders, exacerbating long-running staff shortages.

Around one-third (33%) of respondents to the ISC2 survey noted their organizations didn't have the resources to adequately staff their teams. Meanwhile, 29% said they couldn't afford to hire staff with the skills they need to adequately secure their organizations.

As a result, 72% agreed that reducing security personnel significantly increases the risk of a breach in their organizations.

Crucially, it's a shortage of skilled personnel, rather than mere numbers, that's really giving security professionals headaches. Nearly nine-in-ten said they'd experienced at least one significant cybersecurity-related consequence in their organization because of skills shortages, while 69% said they'd experienced more than one.

An overwhelming 95% of respondents said they had at least one skill need - up 5% from 2024 - and 59% cited critical or significant skills needs, up 15% from last year.

“A shift is happening. This year’s data makes it clear that the most pressing concern for cybersecurity teams isn’t headcount but skills,” said ISC2 acting CEO and CFO Debra Taylor.

“Skills deficits raise cybersecurity risk levels and challenge business resilience.”

AI is a big opportunity for cyber teams

Notably, Taylor said the increased adoption of technologies such as generative AI is welcomed by cybersecurity workers. Nearly three-quarters (73%) said AI will create more specialized cybersecurity skills while 72% said the technology will create the need for more strategic cybersecurity mindsets.

Two-thirds, meanwhile, said AI will require broader skillsets across the workforce.

At present, around 28% of respondents have integrated AI tools into their operations, with 69% engaged in some sort of adoption process: integration, active testing, or early evaluation.

Demand for AI-related cybersecurity skills is also growing, ISC2 found, remaining among the top skills for the second consecutive year.

This year, 41% of respondents cited AI as a top skill needed followed by cloud security at 36%.

Nearly half of respondents said they were already working to gain more generalized AI knowledge and skills, while 35% are educating themselves on AI solutions at risk to better understand vulnerabilities and exploits.

All of this is leading to more confidence, with 87% believing there will always be a need for cybersecurity professionals and 81% confident the profession will remain strong.

"Many cybersecurity professionals view AI as an opportunity for career advancement," said Taylor. "They are using AI tools to automate tasks, and they are investing their time to learn more and demonstrate their expertise in using and securing AI systems."

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Databricks has announced plans to train 100,000 people across the UK and Ireland in AI and data skills.

The skills development scheme will target a range of areas, including generative AI, data engineering, machine learning, and analytics. The initiative will be delivered through the company’s global education program, Databricks Free Edition, and underpinned by $10 million in funding.

Databricks Free Edition offers participants access to self-paced training and AI tools, and is designed to help close what the company claims is a growing AI talent gap.

“The need for highly skilled AI talent, coupled with a robust AI strategy, has never been more crucial for business success,” the company said in a statement.

“According to World Economic Forum data, workers can expect that almost 40% of their existing skill sets will become outdated in the next 5 years, with AI becoming one of the fastest-growing skills needed for today’s workforce.”

Databricks is teaming up with universities

As part of the scheme, Databricks said it plans to work closely with government and academia across the UK and Ireland.

This includes a partnership with the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) through the ‘Get Tech Certified this Autumn’ program.

The program is a three-month scheme which aims to provide free AI and machine learning training for public sector employees across the country, running in tandem with the government’s Blueprint for a Modern Digital Government.

Elsewhere, Databricks is expanding its University Alliance Program, which sees the company work with more than 40 universities across the UK and Ireland. This includes partnerships with the London School of Economics (LSE), University College Dublin, and the University of Sheffield.

The program is helping to equip students at a slew of universities with data and AI-related skills.

Dr Marcos Barreto, Associate Professor of Data Science and Lead on AI for the Department of Statistics at LSE, said the program is enabling students to transition into the workforce with vital skills.

“Providing our data science students with the latest data and AI skills is something we take great pride in. By being part of the Databricks University Alliance program, our students can learn the latest in big data programming and analytics, which is essential to flourish in the fast-paced AI sector,” Dr Barreto said.

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With the tech skills gap showing no signs of closing, very few IT and business professionals believe they're getting enough support for tech learning.

A survey of 1,500 tech executives, IT professionals, and business professionals in the US, UK, and India from tech workforce development firm Pluralsight has revealed that while 95% say building a culture of learning is a priority at their organization, the same number believe they need more support to learn tech skills.

The biggest problem is lack of time, with only 46% of organizations giving employees dedicated time for learning on the job.

"Organizations understand that a culture of continuous learning is essential to staying competitive," said Chris Herbert, chief content officer at Pluralsight.

"However, translating that intention into action with the right strategies, resources, and the time needed to upskill effectively remains a significant challenge for many."

And the problem isn't getting any smaller. While 67% of organizations said they'd made progress in reducing the IT skills gap, that figure is down 11% year-over-year.

And it's having a big effect on business as a whole, with 48% of IT professionals and 58% of business professionals saying they've had to abandon projects in the past year due to technical skill shortages. This problem showed up most in cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, AI and machine learning (ML), and DevOps.

"Finding ways to course-correct towards more effective tech learning programs will be mission-critical as rapid cloud and AI innovations further pressure workforces," said Herbert.

Upskilling is seen as being faster and more cost-effective than hiring, with 89% of organizations saying that hiring IT talent is more expensive than upskilling their current workforce.

Nearly three-quarters of organizations spend less than $5,000 per employee to upskill, while 46% spend over $5,000 to hire a single tech employee. In the US, the contrast is even more stark, with an average upskilling cost of $5,770, compared with $14,170 for hiring.

Meanwhile, 43% of organizations say upskilling is faster than hiring, allowing teams to quickly contribute to critical projects and accelerate time-to-impact.

There are big advantages for workers who do upskill, with the research revealing that certifications are currently the number one factor in job progression for tech professionals – 46% of IT employees who earned certifications reported salary increases or promotions as a direct result.

Meanwhile, 47% of non-technical employees said tech skill 'microcredentials' or digital badges played the biggest role in getting them a raise or helping them get into a new role. They also reckoned that company upskilling programs, bootcamps, and immersive training are just as impactful as employer-funded degrees when it comes to promotions.

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Most European organizations are taking dangerous risks when it comes to security, largely due to a chronic shortage of relevant cyber skills.

According to new research from Insight Enterprises, the skills crisis is forcing 64% of organizations across EMEA to take risky shortcuts and implement temporary fixes to meet security demands.

"Legacy approaches to cybersecurity are being stretched beyond their limits,” researchers said.

“Teams working in silos, with fragmented tools and limited support, are being asked to manage rapidly expanding attack surfaces, secure hybrid infrastructures, and keep pace with the accelerating adoption of AI technologies — all while navigating increasing regulatory demands and growing pressure on budgets.”

The result, researchers said, is a “mounting disconnect” between what enterprises need from cybersecurity, and what current models can deliver.

A concerning portion of businesses employ workarounds or short-term fixes, but researchers warned they come at a huge cost.

“Organizations that can’t keep up with security demands risk not just higher exposure to breaches, but slower innovation, reduced resilience, and missed growth opportunities,” the study noted.

Cyber skills shortages are hurting UK businesses

In the UK, the skills crisis is particularly acute, with researchers finding 67% of enterprises reported a significant talent shortage. More than half (56%) described their talent shortage as ‘severe’ or ‘significant’.

Notably, the biggest problem is at the senior level, with 50% citing gaps in strategic skills such as governance, planning, and risk assessment.

As a result, only 24% of IT decision-makers across EMEA say they have sufficient in-house cyber skills to keep pace with evolving threats. This is has led 57% to delay key initiatives, with the same number struggling to meet compliance requirements.

Cyber skills go beyond technical know-how

Crucially, the study from Insight noted the cyber skills gap isn't just confined to technical roles. Indeed, this issue spans operations, leadership, and compliance functions, undermining both day-to-day resilience and long-term strategic planning.

The biggest barrier to filling the skills gap is the high cost of hiring and training, an issue cited by 68% of respondents, followed by a lack of qualified candidates in the market, at 65%.

Researchers said that while complete replacement of human workers is unrealistic, cultivating leaders who can orchestrate better human-machine collaboration could be a workaround.

The ability for leaders to translate technical risk into business impact and embed security within day-to-day business processes is crucial.

“The organizations that will lead in the next era are those that align strategic talent with intelligent technology and trusted partnerships,” said Adrian Gregory, EMEA president at Insight. "It’s this blend that builds the resilience required to grow, adapt, and stay ahead.”

There is hope for the future, the study noted. Most leaders are confident that AI can revolutionize organizational workflows and 60% expect the cybersecurity skills gap to improve over the next year - although a quarter expect it to get worse.

Meanwhile, training and retention schemes for promising junior staff will be an important strategy for creating a skilled pipeline for mid- and senior-level roles.

“The skills crisis may have started this conversation, but the strategy crisis is what will define its outcome," said Rob O’Connor, Insight's chief information security officer for EMEA.

"Organizations that treat cybersecurity as a strategic business discipline — not a bolt-on IT function — will be the ones who thrive.”

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While more than three-quarters of IT roles now require technical AI abilities, enterprises are increasingly prioritizing “human skills” to ensure responsible development of the technology.

That's according to a study by the AI Workforce Consortium – led by Cisco but made up of firms including Google, Intel, Microsoft, SAP and more – which found that 78% of the job roles analysed in the sector now require AI skills.

Alongside that, seven of the ten fastest-growing IT roles are linked to AI, including AI or machine learning engineering positions, AI risk and governance specialists, and natural language processing engineers.

Notably, the research spotted serious skills deficits when it comes to large language models, prompt engineering, generative AI, AI ethics, and AI security.

"These critical shortages jeopardize organizations’ ability to scale AI responsibly, securely, and effectively, highlighting the urgent need for targeted learning and security upskilling," the report said.

Andre Bechtold, President of SAP Industries & Experiences, added in a statement that security and ethics were key to the AI rollout.

"It is imperative to deliver AI based on the highest security and ethical standards in a way that streamlines compliance across an organization," he said.

Human skills for AI

Alongside technical skills, the report highlighted the ongoing needs for "human skills", saying communication, collaboration, leadership, critical thinking, and problem solving were increasing in importance because of the rise of AI.

"As AI reshapes our world and work, people remain at the center," said Francine Katsoudas, Chief People, Policy & Purpose Officer, Cisco.

"This year's report makes clear that AI skills open exciting new doors, but it's the combination of technical expertise and human strengths like collaboration and leadership that will truly shape a brighter future.

The study noted that Silicon Valley has seen the most growth in AI jobs, up by 156%, followed by London and Toronto, though Manchester, Lyon, and Vancouver were also identified as emerging AI hubs with 70% job growth.

Boosting AI skills

AI is already having an impact on the job market, noted Svenja Gudell, Chief Economist at consortium member Indeed. Other research backs that up: a study from Stanford showed AI is already starting to take over some roles completely.

"AI is changing the very DNA of jobs and with it redefining the job market as we know it," Gudell said.

Spurred by the report, the consortium has agreed to upskilling and reskilling 95 million people globally over the next decade, offering a set of resources to help.

That includes a guide to companies for meeting AI adoption responsibly, a database of more than 200 curated courses for technical and AI skills, as well as an AI skills glossary to help push the AI industry forward in a standardized way.

“How do you prepare your people for the rapid changes that AI promises to bring?” said Himanshu Palsule, CEO at Cornerstone.

“We know from this year’s report, along with past analysis, that skills demands and job requirements around AI are rising exponentially and will only continue to grow."

Katsoudas added: "We are committed to building a workforce that is ready for this new era of growth, and to give people everywhere the opportunity to learn, contribute and benefit."

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HR and learning and development (L&D) professionals across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia are seriously worried about skill shortages.

Only one-in-ten told researchers for Skillsoft's 2025 Global Skills Intelligence Survey that they were fully confident that their workforce had the skills needed to meet business goals over the next 12 to 24 months.

Nearly a third (28%) said they saw skills as the key factor that could make or break their organization’s growth, with leadership, AI, and technology showing up as the most significant shortages.

However, the respondents weren't particularly impressed with the measures their organizations were taking to deal with the skills shortage. Many said they were relying on talent strategies and development programs that were outdated and disconnected from workplace outcomes.

While 85% of respondents have talent development systems in place, only 6% rate them as 'outstanding', and just 20% believe their talent strategies are aligned with organizational goals.

Just under a quarter (24%) are using a consolidated platform approach that provides a clear view of workforce capability. Similarly, respondents complained that their current solutions were fragmented, overly manual, and lacked customization.

“Business transformation depends on the strength, adaptability, and skills of the workforce. These findings should be a wake-up call for every leader,” said Ciara Harrington, chief people officer at Skillsoft.

“Skills gaps are already impeding growth, and traditional approaches to talent development are only worsening the issue.

"To compete in today’s human-AI world, organizations must place skills at the centre of their strategy and evolve toward integrated platforms that connect learning, skills intelligence, and performance in a single place, unlocking a workforce ready for change and innovation.”

AI skills are the biggest problem for UK firms

In the UK, 30% of business leaders reported significant AI skills gaps, ahead of leadership and people management skills at 26%, and technical skills at 18%.

But there was also a big problem with 'overstatement' of skills in these areas. This, respondents noted, was exacerbating skill gaps (39%), reducing team cohesion (36%), and increasing manager stress (33%).

Organizational challenges included poorly-addressed employee engagement issues, cited by 33%, with 27% reporting that their organization was focused on the present rather than planning for the future.

Meanwhile, 26% said employees were being promoted without adequate preparation.

When asked about their future of work concerns, 37% said they feared losing top talent to more agile competitors, 33% cited burnout as a barrier to transformation, and 24% said they’re worried that AI is advancing faster than workforce skillsets.

With AI specifically, 41% said their workforce was resistant to change and 28% said they needed greater technical expertise.

"As workforce needs continue to shift, the research points to the value of connecting skills to every facet of business strategy," the researchers said.

"Leaders who understand their organization’s strengths and gaps – and act on that insight - will be positioned to adapt faster, perform better, and stay competitive in a changing market."

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The UK is facing a growing digital skills crisis, with demand for AI roles way ahead of workforce readiness.

Business communications provider Esendex analyzed automation and AI job listings and training course availability across 17 key industries, using Reed data.

The company found there were around 11,365 active vacancies for automation and AI roles across a raft of UK sectors, with AI representing 69% and automation making up the remaining 31%.

Among the most in-demand roles were data engineer (30%) and python engineer (25%) in AI. This, the company noted, suggests a sharper hiring focus on infrastructure and the programming needs required to fuel AI development.

Other key vacancies included machine learning specialists, accounting for 10% of listings, and automation controls engineer, at 5.7%. Openings for algorithm specialists and robotic process automation (RPA) roles, however, accounted for just 0.4% and 1.6% of listings respectively.

Of the 17 industries analysed on the Automation & AI Readiness Index, 10 sectors scored below 50 out of a possible 1,600. In transport and logistics and health and medicine, job creation and upskilling efforts are failing to keep pace with the increasingly advanced technologies being deployed.

Meanwhile, construction and property - scoring just 6 - fell at the bottom end of the range, with retail scoring 10.4 and human resources 10.5. The company said this is largely due to minimal automation or AI hiring activity, along with limited training options.

"As sectors which employ large parts of the UK workforce, this could leave a huge portion of UK jobs not yet prepared or supported for automation and AI integration," said the team.

AI readiness is accelerating

As you might expect, the IT and telecoms sector achieved the highest readiness index score, at 777.9. It accounted for more than 63% of all automation and AI roles advertised, while also offering the widest training provision with over 2,000 AI-specific courses.

“The UK’s digital economy is rapidly accelerating and seemingly at a faster rate than the workforce can keep up with. As demand for automation and AI integration rises sharply, most industries simply aren’t moving quickly enough to futureproof their teams and implement the infrastructure necessary," said Richard Hanscott, CEO of Esendex.

“While a handful of sectors are making bold moves toward digital capability, the majority, particularly labor-intensive sectors, are at risk of being left behind. This isn’t down to a lack of ambition, but a severe lack of readiness, investment and skills planning."

Upskilling is needed to overcome growing skills gaps

Essendex recommends upskilling and reskilling the workforce, with targeted programs in automation engineering and tools, AI technologies, and digital communication platforms.

Organizations should use automation to enhance, not replace, human teams, automating repetitive tasks like FAQs, order updates, and appointment confirmations through methods such as SMS automation.

Additionally, the firm advised enterprises to invest in user-friendly tools like AI-powered chatbots and automated SMS software, which can help with the growing skills gap by providing an immediate, scalable solution.

“The real threat isn’t just lost productivity, but of being outpaced by competitors who are already automating smarter, communicating faster, and scaling more efficiently," said Hanscott.

"With solutions like automated SMS software helping to shape the way firms engage customers, the opportunity is clear. But if UK businesses don’t bridge the skills gap now, they may find themselves stuck on legacy systems while their competitors race ahead.”

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A shortage of cybersecurity specialists is leaving the UK at serious risk of attacks unless urgent action is taken to plug critical gaps.

That's according to a researcher at De Montfort University, who wrote a paper for the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Cyber Innovation with a to-do list to help fill the country's long-running skills gap.

The paper called on the government to focus on clearly identifying the necessary skills in order to ensure would-be security staff get the right training.

Dr Ismini Vasileiou, an Associate Professor at De Montfort University Leicester and director of the East Midlands Cyber Security Cluster (EMCSC), warned that a shortage of security professionals poses huge risks to the UK.

Indeed, a report from Fortinet suggests as many as 80% of data breaches are caused by lackluster capabilities on this front.

"Recent arrests in relation to cyber-attacks on M&S and Co-op show the real and growing threat faced by UK citizens and businesses," she said in a statement. "What doesn’t make the headlines is the UK’s chronic shortage of cyber professionals."

"This is emerging as a critical situation for SMEs, which are the backbone of the UK economy but which are increasingly exposed as they race to meet modern digital expectations and standards," Vasileiou added.

The cybersecurity sector faces huge challenges

Part of the problem, the report noted, is "misaligned supply and demand", with universities and training networks producing thousands of graduates annually, but employers still reporting shortages.

"The disconnect lies in the types of skills being taught versus those needed—particularly at mid-level and specialist tiers," the report noted.

The paper also highlighted the difficulty of joining the industry at graduate level, calling for more apprenticeships to help develop applicable skills for aspiring security professionals.

"Entry-level pathways are limited and confusing, with job adverts frequently demanding years of experience," the report noted.

All of that is exacerbated by disruption in the industry from automation and AI, according to Vasileiou. AI solutions aren’t just being used by professionals operating in the sector, but by threat actors to fine-tune capabilities and accelerate attacks.

While learning AI fundamentals is key, merely gaining technical skills in such technologies isn't sufficient, the report warned.

"AI is not just a technical problem — it is a socio-technical issue requiring interdisciplinary thinking," the paper added.

"There’s currently a mismatch between Government industrial ambition and educational reality," she added. "We won’t secure a 21st Century digital economy with a 20th Century skills pipeline."

Five steps to close the skills gap

To address this confluence of issues, Vasileiou’s paper outlined five key steps to improve the cybersecurity training situation across the country.

This includes calls for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) to set up a taskforce to create a cyber skills ‘taxonomy’.

The report noted this will define roles, career pathways, and skill levels, helping to ensure we know what training is needed and what jobs it will lead to. The next step is to set up a national delivery body to govern that taxonomy.

Beyond that, Vasileiou called for employer incentives — such as grants or best-practice endorsements — to encourage the adoption of standardization in security recruitment with regard to skills.

"This will help shift recruitment away from outdated proxies (e.g. certifications alone) toward clear, inclusive role definitions," the report added.

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Meta has been on a multi-billion dollar hiring spree in recent months, and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis thinks it shows the company is scrambling to keep pace in the AI race.

In a recent appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast, Hassabis suggested the tech giant is fighting tooth and nail to catch competitors in the space, noting that they’re “not at the frontier” – and top AI talent could bridge the gap.

“It’s probably rational what they’re doing from their perspective because they’re behind and they need to do something,” he told Fridman.

Spearheaded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s quest to secure top talent has seen the tech giant dangle eye-watering offers to high-profile figures from the generative AI space.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last month that Meta had attempted to poach AI researchers with signing-on bonuses as high as $100 million. These sums pale in comparison to another big money offer put to a leading industry figure.

Zuckerberg reportedly reached out with an offer to acquire the startup launched by OpenAI’s former CTO, Mira Murati. According to reports from the Wall Street Journal, the offer was knocked back and staff at the startup were met with an onslaught of job offers.

The proposal, put to co-founder Andrew Tulloch, included a billion-dollar package that could exceed $1.5 billion over six years with bonuses taken into account, sources told the WSJ.

Billion-dollar pay packages for a single individual may seem unlikely, but given Meta’s current focus, it’s clear Zuckerberg is willing to part with cash to secure the industry’s top figures.

In June, the tech giant unveiled the launch of the Meta Superintelligence Labs, a new division aimed at driving development of new foundation models, including its Llama range.

Notably, the unit will be led by some other high-profile hires, including Scale AI’s former CEO, Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman, former chief executive at GitHub.

Wang, who now serves as Meta’s Chief AI officer, was brought onboard following the company’s $14.3 billion investment in the AI startup.

Hassabis noted that one key challenge facing Meta may lie in how many researchers view their role in pioneering the technology – they’re looking to “steward the technology safely into the world”.

“There’s more important things than just money,” he told Fridman. Of course, one has to pay people their market rates and all of these things, and that continues to go up.”

The quest for top AI talent

Lower down the food chain, the same talent-related issues are affecting enterprises across a range of industries. Since the advent of generative AI in late 2022, enterprises have faced acute shortages of workers with AI skills.

Research from Amazon Web Services (AWS) in early 2024 showed some employers are willing to pay a 31% premium for staff with relevant AI expertise.

The findings, based on a survey of IT leaders, showed that staff with experience in research and development also command a 30% premium. Workers with AI skills in domains such as marketing, finance, and sales, can also expect a 27% pay bump, the survey found.

Similar research from Indeed in February 2024 showed that workers with AI skills can expect to command a wage 47% higher than those without.

Higher salary demands also create a bigger strain on budgets, however. Analysis from CloudZero found that while investment in the technology is surging, expectations among top talent mean hiring is a challenge for some enterprises.

35% of companies surveyed by the firm said rising salary costs are among the biggest barriers to filling gaps in their AI talent pool, further exacerbating the issue.

All told, typical salaries top $100,000, the study found, with a quarter earning between $150,000 and $200,000.

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The UK government has announced plans to invest £187 million to bolster tech skills across the country in a move welcomed by industry stakeholders.

Unveiled on the opening day of London Tech Week, the ‘TechFirst’ program aims to give young people and workers across the UK access to training schemes in areas such as artificial intelligence.

The program will see individuals given options to upskill and reskill, while around one million secondary school students will have the chance to “learn about technology and gain access to new skills training and career opportunities”.

The move by the government comes in the wake of research from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DIST), which found that by 2035 roughly 10 million workers will be in positions where AI plays a role in some form of their daily responsibilities.

Research from the DSIT also found an additional 3.9 million workers will hold positions in which AI directly impacts their role.

Speaking at London Tech Week, prime minister Keir Starmer said the scheme aimed to put “AI into the hands of the next generation so they can shape the future” and not be shaped by it.

“This training program will unlock opportunity in every classroom – and lays the foundations for a new era of growth,” he said. “Too many children from working families like the one I grew up in are written off. I am determined to end that.”

“This program is the Plan for Change in action – breaking down barriers, driving innovation, and giving every young person the chance of a good, well paid job and a bright future,” Starmer added.

As part of the country-wide skills focus, Starmer said collaboration between government and industry stakeholders will be key.

This will include partnerships with a host of major tech firms, including Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft, to give 7.5 million workers opportunities to learn “essential” AI skills by 2030 to meet growing demands.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who appeared on stage with Starmer at the opening of the week-long event, said AI talent and skills will be “crucial ingredients” in the UK’s long-term goal to position itself as a leading tech economy.

“We’re delighted to partner with the government to train the next generation of AI developers, capable of finding new cures for diseases, discovering new materials and building world-class AI companies,” he said.

TechFirst program a “major step forward” for UK industry

The move has been welcomed as a positive step in both bolstering the UK’s tech skills pool and giving individuals from traditionally underrepresented communities an opportunity to pursue tech careers.

Sheila Flavell CBE, COO of FDM Group, said it’s “encouraging to see the government prioritizing skills development” for young people in particular.

“As technology continues to evolve at pace, equipping individuals with the right training is crucial to ensure they can thrive in emerging fields such as AI, cybersecurity, and digital infrastructure,” he said.

“There must be a continued focus on building accessible pathways into these careers, such as apprenticeships which play a vital role in this, supporting lifelong learning and upskilling to meet the needs of a dynamic workforce,” Flavell added.

“By investing in high-quality training and promoting greater diversity in tech, we can empower the next generation to drive innovation and strengthen the UK’s position as a global leader in digital industries."

The training program will include the launch of an online platform which aims to provide learning tools and training opportunities for students interested in technology careers.

This already has over 100,000 students registered, according to the government, and will be supported by a “local delivery partner” in each of the UK’s regions and constituent nations.

Greg Fuller, VP of Skillsoft Codecademy, echoed Flavell’s comments, noting that it represents a “major step forward” for the industry and will help cultivate a digitally literate workforce.

“With a £187 million investment dedicated to expanding access to digital and AI learning, this initiative shows that the UK is investing not just in technology, but in people,” he said.

“In an AI-driven economy, digital literacy isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. While AI is transforming how we work, its true potential will only be realized when individuals have the knowledge, skills, and confidence to use them effectively.

“By aiming to equip 1 million secondary school students and 7.5 million workers with foundational AI and digital skills by 2030, the government is taking bold action to close the digital skills gap at scale and at pace.”

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Tech upskilling platform Multiverse has announced plans to train 15,000 new AI apprentices over the next two years.

The apprenticeships will be created and delivered in partnership with employers around the country, including Skanska, Visa, Capita, and Legal & General.

"AI isn't just a buzzword for us; it's a critical enabler of efficiency and growth. AI will soon be embedded in all our delivery teams, to help us create innovative solutions for our customers," said Derrick Hastie, chief technology officer, asset management, at L&G.

"But technology alone isn't enough. Education and skills are essential to ensure our people aren't just observers of change — they're active architects of it."

Meanwhile, professional services company Capita has enrolled nearly 200 apprentices onto AI programs across its UK offices from Bradford to Bristol, while Nottingham City Council is upskilling 40 of its staff in AI.

Multiverse, which already has more than 2,200 AI apprentices enrolled through over 200 employers, said the program supports the government's AI Opportunities Action Plan.

"Cutting-edge technologies like AI are transforming the way our economy works, so it is vital that British people have the right skills to make the most of the new opportunities tech presents. These efforts are central to the ambitions for jobs and growth, at the heart of our Plan for Change," said science and technology secretary Peter Kyle.

"Multiverse's commitment to thousands of AI apprenticeships will help us achieve just that, backing people right across our country to develop the skills they need to for a career in AI, no matter where they live."

The new AI apprentices are starting to enrol through their employers already, either coming in as new hires or through upskilling initiatives for existing staff.

The aim is to tailor training to apprentices' level of expertise, from AI ethics and prompt engineering to data management, governance, and the development of machine learning and AI models.

All programs will be delivered by industry-expert coaches, with the apprentices’ new skills put into practice in their day-to-day roles. Apprenticeships are available for people of any age or at any stage of their career.

"Whether it's impacting you directly yet or not, we are already undergoing an AI revolution - and the key to winning in this new era lies in augmenting human capability," said Multiverse CEO Euan Blair.

"Our commitment to 15,000 AI apprenticeships is a bold declaration that AI skills must be for everyone, at every stage of their career. We want to equip entire organisations with the ability to seize the opportunities AI offers and build the workforce of tomorrow."

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Millennials are driving the AI revolution in workplaces by focusing on the necessary skills development, according to new research.

A study from Workday found the cohort had the strongest belief in AI and was taking a more proactive approach to capitalize on the technology through skills development — though millennials and Gen X staff both largely agreed on the matter.

Of course, millennials are hardly the youngsters in work anymore — the term refers to people born between 1981 and 1996, now aged 29 to 44. As a generation that has grown up with changing technology and now in positions of management, it makes sense that this cohort is leading innovation in the workplace.

The research showed that 60% of millennial leaders were concerned about a skills shortage, more than the 47% of Gen X leaders. Similarly, 92% of millennials were keen to pursue a more proactive approach to skills development, versus 76% of Gen X employees who were surveyed.

"Agentic AI is ushering in a new world of digital labor, where you can scale and transform with autonomous agents whilst augmenting the workforce," said Paul O’Sullivan, SVP Solution Engineering and UKI CTO at Salesforce, in a statement provided by Workday.

"This represents a unique opportunity to unlock new levels of productivity, autonomy, and speed only if leaders and workers reskill and upskill. All industries and teams need to be empowered to redesign and redeploy talent for the skills the AI-powered economy demands."

Workday has previously released research saying that AI could be the key to solving the UK's productivity problem, but earlier this year slashed 10% of its own workforce amid a strategic shift to AI.

Differing priorities

Notably, the study suggested Gen X leaders placed more importance on operational and specialist skills, including project management and engineering. This came in stark contrast to millennial leaders who prioritized "human skills" such as leadership and communication.

A majority of both generational cohorts saw focusing on skills development as a way to close productivity gaps, reduce unemployment, equalize access to opportunities, and increase inclusion, but on each point millennials were ten to 25 points ahead of their older colleagues.

Again, both groups see AI as a useful tool for shifting an organization towards a skills-based approach, but a third of millennials are concerned their employer lacks clarity on using AI to address talent shortages versus just 14% of Gen Xers polled.

Nine-in-ten of both cohorts say they believe their organizations are heading in the right direction, at least.

"The UK faces a pivotal challenge: our workforce models are lagging behind the pace of technological change," said Daniel Pell, Vice President and Country Manager for the UK and Ireland at Workday.

"To compete in an AI-driven economy, businesses must rethink how they identify and develop skills. This is not a question of technology alone, it is a question of leadership, agility and long-term competitiveness. The organizations that succeed will be those that treat workforce transformation as a strategic priority, ensuring both people and AI can work effectively together."

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The rapid explosion of AI has created the UK's biggest and fastest growing tech skills shortage in more than 15 years, according to new research.

Findings from the latest Nash Squared/Harvey Nash Digital Leadership Report shows that nine-in-ten technology leaders across the country are now either piloting AI or investing in development projects.

This sharpened focus on adoption and implementation is causing issues with regard to talent, however, with half revealing they are now contending with a significant AI skills shortage - marking a 20% increase on last year.

Yet despite facing talent shortages, only four-in-ten organisations are upskilling current staff to compensate, the study noted.

“As AI continues to accelerate, the scale of the skills challenge is becoming clear. UK businesses have a pressing need to ensure their technology teams are equipped with the skills to leverage AI to full effect, or the implementations they are making could fall short," warned Bev White, CEO of Nash Squared.

"As AI is so new, there is no ‘playbook’ here – it’s about a mix of approaches including formal training where available, reskilling IT staff and staff outside of the traditional IT function to widen the pool, on-the-job experimentation, and knowledge sharing and transfer."

Bullish enterprises are pushing ahead with hiring

The organizations that are furthest ahead with large-scale implementations are 21% more likely to be increasing their tech headcount than the rest, mostly in the areas of AI and data.

Notably, while UK tech leaders said they expected one-in-seven of their technology jobs to be carried out by AI in the next five years, the report found that AI isn’t replacing people, it’s simply changing the kind of people leaders want to hire

Almost two-thirds of UK tech leaders, for example, said they'd choose an AI-skilled software developer with just two years’ experience over one with a five-year career but no AI skills.

In other areas of tech, with the number of cyber attacks in the UK increasing once again, demand for cyber skills is surging, with Nash Squared recording a 43% increase since last year's report.

When it comes to software engineers, though, there was actually a decline in demand, down by 8%. The report suggests that with software development the most widely adopted use case for AI, the technology is finally plugging a long-standing skills gap.

Salaries are rising

Rates of pay are also improving across the sector, the study found, particularly among senior staff. More than half of UK tech leaders said they had received a salary increase in the last year.

Of those that pulled in a pay rise of 10% or more, three-quarters had a CEO who's significantly more focused on technology making money for the organization, rather than saving it.

"AI is front and center of most organizations’ technology plans – and it’s encouraging to see that the UK businesses that are the furthest ahead also have the biggest people need. Rather than killing jobs, AI is changing them and creating new working models," said Andy Heyes, managing director of Harvey Nash, UK&I and Central Europe.

"It is also spilling over into a higher likelihood of pay rises, on average, for technology leaders. AI is changing the technology industry and the people dynamics within it, creating new fields of opportunity for those that embrace the challenge."

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It’s been over two years since Hack the Box completed a $55 million Series B funding round, but CEO Haris Pylarinos is keen to continue riding the wave of optimism at the company and make inroads into new markets.

Speaking to ITPro in the wake of the investment round in January 2023, Pylarinos said the company planned to triple its headcount and accelerate global expansion.

In a follow-up interview last month, the chief executive revealed these plans are continuing at a good pace. The company now boasts sites in the UK, Greece, and US, but has taken a cautious approach to increasing headcount rather than haphazardly expanding.

“Overall the Series B gave a great push to the company,” he told ITPro. “We have grown significantly since then, but sensibly at the same time. Our headcount, roughly speaking, is approaching the 300 mark.”

There are positive signs across the board for Hack the Box at present, according to Pylarinos. The company has expanded its enterprise customer base, now working with major brands such as Siemens, Google, and Lufthansa, and its community platform has surpassed the three million user mark.

Hack the Box provides gamified training programs to help organizations and individuals improve cybersecurity awareness and skills. These war game-style cybersecurity programs include real-world threat scenarios, all of which use techniques commonly used by threat actors.

When the company launched in 2017, this was a market ripe with opportunity – and with accelerating threats and skills gaps in the years following placing organizations at huge risk, the company capitalized.

Hack the Box infuses cyber training with AI

Notably, the Series B enabled the company to further expand its offerings, this time capitalizing on a new industry trend: generative AI. In December last year, the company launched a new AI-powered Crisis Control service aimed at taking its gamified training programs one step further.

This tests users’ cyber defense capabilities using real-time breach and crisis simulations, all powered by AI to throw the occasional spanner into the works and ensure they’re able to adapt and respond to a worst-case scenario.

As with the original training programs, Pylarinos told ITPro there was a gap in the market. Similarly, crisis simulations were - and still are - an area where security leaders have been keen to sharpen up and increase budgets to prepare for the worst.

Research from Hack the Box found 74% of CISOs plan to increase budgets for crisis simulation exercises in the year ahead, underlining the enthusiasm for these offerings.

“Crisis control is an important product, a product that reaches the boardroom where the decisions are made in cybersecurity incidents,” he said. “The fact that we use AI helps keep each and every exercise relevant.”

Crisis simulation programs are by no means new, nor is the use of AI in curating these, Pylarinos admitted. However, what he believes separates Hack the Box from other offerings is the fact that the AI model underpinning the scheme was built in-house and isn’t a rehashed product simply infused with AI.

Indeed, each training program is catered specifically to the organization, their unique needs, and based on the industry they operate in.

“A common theme you see on the market is that ‘we used ChatGPT to create the narrative’ - this isn’t the case,” he said. “What we actually do is we scan public information, like news articles, for example, and we understand what is the current trend in the vertical that the organization is in.”

As an example, Pylarinos told ITPro that an organization operating in the financial services sector would be given a crisis control simulation based on factors such as increased APT activities in that industry, or specific malware strains being used against financial institutions.

“Our system understands that and builds an exercise based on what is going on today in the market. So you are training on something that is extremely realistic and relevant to your specific industry. I think that's the advantage of utilizing AI in that capacity.”

So far, feedback on the service has been great, Pylarinos said. Admittedly, though, the program is still in its infancy so it’s not quite reached the volume where he could definitively outline the true benefits or impact.

Further gains afoot for Hack the Box

Looking ahead, Pylarinos told ITPro the company plans to continue expanding, and growth remains solid. Notably, the chief executive said “I don’t see a fundraise coming any time soon” on account of its positive cash flow.

“We are becoming more and more cash efficient as time progresses without sacrificing growth, meaning that there is a very good chance that we pass the burning point where you spend more capital than you earn and become profitable in the following years.”

There are positive signs the company is making further inroads into other verticals, Pylarinos added. The company initially started as "primarily a red team player” training penetration testers.

But now the company is fostering closer ties with the blue and purple team domains - and it’s a trend he appears keen on pursuing further by leveraging the company's expertise and established reputation in the red teaming space.

“We are now a fully fledged powerhouse, catering for red, blue and purple needs,” he said. “Blue [teamers] is a much bigger market, so there are more potential users out there that would benefit from our content.

“The fact that we have so much expertise on the red side helps us recapitalize this and train the defensive side on how to deflect and manage the most difficult cyber attacks out there.”

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IBM has teamed up with the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) for a cyber skills program for girls.

The company confirmed it will provide the online platform for this year's CyberFirst Girls competition, a UK-wide program open to girls between the ages of 12 and 13.

Run by the NCSC, the competition is the UK’s flagship cybersecurity program for schools, with more than 85,000 students across the country having taken part since its launch in 2017.

Students participate in a series of cyber challenges ranging from cryptography and networking to AI.

"IBM is delighted to build upon our partnership with the National Cyber Security Centre by supporting the CyberFirst Girls competition with DSIT," said Mark Hughes, IBM global managing partner for cybersecurity.

"This new collaboration is a significant step towards nurturing the next generation of cyber leaders, ensuring a more inclusive and robust industry. We are confident that this partnership will make a substantial impact in encouraging more young girls to pursue rewarding careers in cybersecurity."

While average salaries in the sector top £56,000 – with the top 20% earning between £73,000 and £350,000 - almost half of UK businesses report having cybersecurity skills gaps.

More than four-in-ten have a basic skills gap, research shows, while 27% have gaps in advanced skills such as penetration testing.

But while broadening the talent pool clearly helps, official figures show that women currently make up just 17% of the UK's cyber workforce.

Diversity in cyber still lacking

Last year, the government's annual cybersecurity skills report found that, despite a significant skills gap, a lack of diversity is a persistent challenge in the workforce.

While there's been a general upward trend in the number of women from ethnic minority backgrounds in the UK cybersecurity workforce, this improvement appears to have tailed off.

"If we’re going to keep the UK safe from the threats we face online, then we need to build a diverse workforce which is reflective of every community in the country," said minister for cybersecurity Feryal Clark.

“By partnering with IBM to deliver the next edition of the CyberFirst Girls Competition, we’re driving forward our plans to do exactly that – building up the skills of young girls across the country and nurturing the next generation of UK cyber leaders."

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The government must intervene in upskilling workers for the AI revolution, with industry experts warning it can't be left to industry alone.

That's the assessment offered by a panel of digital training experts speaking at AI UK, the annual conference held by the Alan Turing Institute.

The rise of AI has many concerned about the impact on jobs, suggesting a degree of retraining will be needed to help humans keep pace with the technology — or find a new role entirely. Those left behind without AI skills will be stuck in less well paying jobs, according to one report.

Beyond that, tech giants and governments alike are concerned about the lack of AI talent coming through the pipeline, with a shortage of skilled AI experts predicted to slow innovation — that's the motivation behind the UK's AI Action Plan, which aims to create 13,000 jobs in the industry.

But while meeting this expected demand will be a cross-sector challenge, David Crozier, director of the AI Collaboration Centre (AICC), noted that filling future gaps can’t be left to tech companies.

“Industry only supports it [training efforts] if they see commercial opportunity at the end of it,” he told attendees.

But there's more to AI than just productivity for companies, notes Tom Crick, Professor of Digital Education & Policy at Swansea University and the Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA) at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Beyond the economy, AI has a very clear social and cultural imperative.

"The lens through which you view AI upskilling, for this to be responsible and ethical, and be citizen centered — is this of benefit to citizens and society, not just that it will help get a job or as an industry thing," he said.

"The pace of change is so quick, it really needs a nation wide or region wide intervention," added Crozier, comparing it — rather surprisingly — to sheep dipping, the process by which the animals are treated with pesticides to avoid the spread of parasites.

That said, the panelists agreed there was a role for companies to make use of micro-learning and offer life-long learning opportunities to enable employees to keep up. Liz Williams, the CEO of FutureDotNow, called for a cultural change in these topics, to centre them in our work lives.

Existing skills gap

Perhaps we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves. Williams noted that her organization's research suggests more than half of the UK workforce currently lack the essential 20 or so digital skills for work — and that's before AI comes into the picture.

"These are not advanced skills. Nine of the tasks are about online safety and security," she said, such as passwords. "People do not necessarily have those skills."

Williams noted that this applies across all demographics. One-in-two academics, for example, lacks one of 20 digital skills designated as necessary in the modern workforce, as do half of young people.

"It's a really ubiquitous issue," she said. "We assume people will acquire these skills through osmosis, but they won't. We need to help them acquire and maintain those skills."

Confused companies

It's not just individuals struggling to see how they will stay relevant amid a rise in AI in the workplace. Company leaders are unsure of how to best use AI, added Crozier.

Discussing company leaders who came to his organization for support, Crozier said they admitted they lacked the core skills needed to implement AI, let alone their staff.

"They didn't know what they needed to procure, a lot of the individuals we engaged with, their understanding of AI was pretty limited — they understand ChatGPT or Copilot, and they use it as a glorified Google."

To help, Crozier said he's been trying to explain the broader underlying technologies, while asking them what specific problems they're trying to solve, while also addressing issues like costs and ROI.

"It's not just about basic AI literacy, the leadership in those organizations are crying out for advice and guidance and a bit more knowledge — and perhaps they're a little bit embarrassed about their lack of understanding."

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With more than half of enterprise leaders worried about future skills shortages, many organizations are turning to a range of new techniques to expand potential talent pools.

According to Workday's Global State of Skills report, only 54% of leaders say they have a clear view of the skills within their workforce today, and fewer than a third are confident that their organization has the skills needed for long-term success.

It's not always technical skill sets that are in high demand, however, with the research finding an equally critical need for uniquely human skill sets.

Social skills like communication and teamwork, and individual skills like resilience and creativity are listed as the most impactful skill gaps faced by organizations today, followed by digital fluency, including AI and software proficiency.

Indeed, the study noted that these skills shortages are leading to a move away from the traditional focus on job roles, qualifications, or titles when hiring and fostering talent.

Workday found firms are instead moving to ‘skills-based talent strategies’, which prioritize an individual’s capabilities over traditional credentials and focus on identifying, developing, and deploying specific skills and competencies.

According to the study, more than half of organizations worldwide are already switching to a skills-based talent model, with another 23% planning to start this year.

Eight-in-ten leaders agree that adopting a skills-based approach improves productivity, innovation, and organizational agility. They also said it increased access to job opportunities for employees, improved workforce equality, and cut unemployment.

Notably, AI is helping here by streamlining routine and repetitive tasks, enhancing decision making with data-driven insights, personalizing learning and development programs, and predicting the need for future skills.

"AI is reshaping the workplace, but the human element has never been more essential," said Chris Ernst, chief learning officer at Workday.

"Organizations that embrace a skills-first mindset will not only unlock AI’s potential but also harness human ingenuity in new and transformative ways."

There are, though, challenges to a skills-based approach. The time needed to reskill employees was a problem for 43% of business leaders, with 38% having difficulties caused by resistance to change.

Meanwhile, 28% cited a lack of infrastructure to support skills-based talent management, and the same number highlighted inadequate skills measurement tools.

‘Hiring for promise’ gains traction

Running parallel to the skills-based strategy approach, many organizations are also employing ‘hiring for promise’ practices.

Hiring for promise is a recruitment technique which takes into account a candidate’s potential willingness to expand on their existing skill sets, developing new capabilities to support the organization.

Recent analysis from Gartner found that adopting this approach - rather than focusing primarily on traditional criteria - is the most effective and efficient way to close skills gaps in enterprises.

Gartner’s study found that employees hired on promise were 1.9 times more likely to perform effectively, and played a vital role in plugging talent gaps.

Notably, half of HR leaders said this has been driven by the fact that demand for skills is evolving rapidly, meaning in-house talent can’t keep up with new requirements.

Similarly, with talent pools drying up across a range of professions, recruitment professionals are widening their nets to compensate.

"Waiting to find an employee with all of the exact skills listed for a role significantly shrinks the pool of potential candidates," said Annika Jessen, director of the Gartner HR practice.

"Instead, managers should focus on defining simple, foundational role requirements to reach a wider group of candidates."

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The UK government has identified the nation’s cybersecurity sector as a key economic growth driver citing “exceptional performance” over the last year, but experts say the sector has more to offer if certain obstacles can be overcome.

A new report released by the Department for Science, Information, and Technology (DSIT) revealed the UK’s cybersecurity sector generated £13.2 billion over the last year, including £7.8 billion in gross value added (GVA).

The sector currently employs an estimated 67,300 people, and Feryal Clark, MP and parliamentary undersecretary of state at DSIT, revealed it created 6,600 new jobs in the past year alone, stating it is a “key part of our vision for kickstarting economic growth”.

The current government, and its predecessor, set out bold ambitions for the UK to become a tech hub and global leader in the AI space, and the DSIT report claimed cybersecurity will be fundamental in realizing these ambitions.

“Cybersecurity is critical to our economic resilience and underpins the deployment of all emerging technology, but also routine transactions, from banking to social media, that we all rely on,” Clark’s foreword to the report stated.

Speaking to ITPro, experts agree that the cybersecurity sector has a lot to offer the national economy, but said there are key barriers to exploiting the remaining value the industry has to offer.

What’s holding the UK cybersecurity sector back?

Andy Kays, CEO at Socura, suggested the £13 billion figure is slightly underestimating the true value the sector adds to the UK economy, arguing that if the UK can address a handful of significant challenges it could unlock "incalculable" growth potential.

“£13bn is a lot of money but the real value added to the UK economy by the cybersecurity market is incalculable,” he claimed.

“While it’s great to see growth, there is so much more potential, particularly if we can address long-standing issues such as lack of technical skills, regional disparities, lack of investment in research and startups, and apathy amongst SMEs.”

DSIT research into cybersecurity skills in the UK labor market in 2024 warned that skills gaps have not shifted much in the last six years, estimating that 637,000 (44%) businesses in the UK have basic skills gaps.

The report noted this means employees responsible for security in these businesses lack the confidence to carry out the basic tasks laid out in the government-backed Cyber Essentials scheme.

Furthermore, DSIT projected that 390,000 (27%) have advanced skills gaps, which refers to skills that are not outsourced but considered important or required for businesses with more complex security needs.

Speaking to ITPro, Jason Howells, VP of Channels EMEA at Barracuda Networks, said another major issue affecting the industry is the disparity between SMBs and larger enterprises. A common misconception among many smaller businesses is that they don't need to invest in cyber as heavily, which is placing many - and the broader business landscape - at risk.

“There is still the perception that the smaller guys don’t need to worry about it because they’re not going to get attacked, they’re not the target audience, and it’s exactly the opposite," he said. "They’re exactly the target audience for that very reason that they haven’t made the right investments.”

Howells cautioned, however, that ongoing global talent shortages only exacerbate this problem as those SMBs that do take their security seriously aren’t able to attract or retain people with the required skills.

“Even if they had the biggest budgets in the world, even if they had all the inclination in the world to go and try and build out this stuff for themselves, they’d never be able to do it, because you can’t find the people or afford the people to be able to do it,” he explained.

“Even if you can find them, because there is such a skill shortage in the world, to retain them is a full-time job.”

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While government plans to create 13,000 jobs as part of its AI Action Plan have been welcomed, researchers have raised concerns over a potential lack of skilled labor to meet growing demand in the industry.

AI positions are among the hardest for organizations to fill, according to a study from HR platform Deel, with nearly a quarter of enterprises revealing they were most worried about their ability to recruit for AI roles this year.

Matt Monette, UK country manager at Deel, said the UK’s ambition to become a global hub for AI innovation will “hinge on whether organizations have the right skills to make that happen”.

"Clearly, businesses are worried that isn’t the case and without the right people, they - and the wider British economy - will struggle to realise the benefits that AI promises,” he said.

As a result, many organizations are looking overseas to attract the right talent, researchers found. Nearly half of business leaders said they were considering hiring for tech jobs internationally this year.

Nearly three-quarters of IT firms specifically said they would hire internationally to accommodate for talent shortages.

"Hiring from abroad can ease this pain point, letting organizations expand their nets for identifying the right skills for plugging technical gaps," Monette said.

"Plus, not only does it bring in the talent necessary for today’s tech challenges but also sets the stage for sustainable growth in a world where workers are increasingly demanding flexibility to work from anywhere."

The main sources of foreign talent are the US and Europe, both cited by around half the respondents, followed by Canada at 32%. Asian regions such as India and China were also seen as potential talent hubs.

International demand for UK tech roles is already high, Deel data shows, with visa applications placing Britain as the fifth most popular country globally for expats working in the sector.

Red tape could hinder access to international talent

However, British businesses are worried about the potential barriers restricting them from accessing global talent.

The largest concerns highlighted by enterprises include complex legal requirements, cited 55%, followed by stricter immigration policies and compliance risks, both cited by about half of business leaders.

The government outlined a series of steps aimed at bolstering AI-related talent to accommodate its plans.

Notably, the AI Action Plan specifically highlighted scholarship and fellow programs as potential ways to drive talent into the sector, along with the creation of Skills England and the Curriculum and Assessment Review.

These initiatives, it said, would help upskill the existing workforce, as well as teaching young people key skills.

Concerns over AI talent are by no means a new trend for UK tech businesses, with research from last year highlighting this as one of the key barriers to adoption plans.

In a survey from Red Hat, more than eight-in-ten tech leaders said the sector faces an ‘urgent’ AI talent gap. Workers skilled in areas such as generative AI, large language models (LLMs), and data science were hugely sought after, but enterprises struggled to fill roles.

This marked an increase compared to the year prior, Red Hat noted, with AI skills shortages now representing the biggest headache for c-suites ahead of access to cybersecurity talent.

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Only four-in-ten businesses have programs in place to hire more women, new research shows, despite a majority of IT professionals agreeing that there's not enough diversity in the sector.

According to a new study from ISACA, three-quarters of businesses say that attracting and retaining talent is a challenge. But female IT professionals believe they are still being shut out.

Nearly half (43%) of female respondents said a main reason that women are still underrepresented in tech roles is because most IT role models and leaders are male.

Other key issues highlighted in the study included pay inequality, according to 42% of women, though this was recognized by only 15% of men.

Overall, men tended to rate their sense of authority in specific areas of their current role more highly than women. This showed up particularly when it came to making purchasing decisions, where there was a gap of 13 percentage points, and in contributing to company strategy and direction, with a 10-point gap.

"More needs to be done to increase the representation of women in the IT and technology sector — and more needs to be done to welcome their leadership and influence," said Julia Kanouse, chief membership officer at ISACA, who oversees the association’s SheLeadsTech program.

"This will not only help to address the global skills gap and boost productivity in the sector—it will also create a more inclusive and diverse working environment."

The survey found that more than half of women would like to see more mentors or role models, with others calling for tech clubs or women's networking groups and for more female tech professors to be hired.

However, 68% of women - along with 72% of men - said they were extremely or very satisfied with their career progression. Meanwhile, 73% of women and 71% percent of men said they had received a salary increase or promotion in the last two years.

"Encouragingly, women have near-equal career progression satisfaction to their male counterparts and are slightly more likely to have received a raise or a promotion in the last two years," said Sarah Orton, UK and Europe lead for ISACA's SheLeadsTech initiative.

A report this time last year from career advice site Women in Tech uncovered five common obstacles facing women entering the tech sector.

These included lack of awareness and industry contact, a lack of role models, confidence issues, exclusionary hiring processes, and discrimination - all similar to the barriers identified by ISACA.

"Having a workforce of people with different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives to bring to the table is not only the right thing to do – it’s also a business imperative that makes an organization more innovative and its work that much more efficient and effective,” Orton said.

“Progress has been made – but the sector has more work to do.”

IT leaders have become increasingly worried by cost of living pressures which have raised salary demands of employees to levels that businesses cannot match.

C-suite executives identified salary demands driven by increasing prices as among the top three issues facing organisations amidst tech talent shortages, according to a new report.

These also included growing demands for a four-day work week, with 40% of respondents having flagged this as a structure they cannot currently provide.

Many respondents indicated that the unstable economic and hiring landscape is making staff recruitment and retention much more difficult, with 42% worried that staff will leave due to burnout. 46% of respondents stated that due to staff shortages, overworked staff are having to 'fight fires' and this is having a detrimental effect on productivity.

The results were published in enterprise software provider Rimini Street’s IT leader future outlook report 2023, which gathered data from a range of CIOs and CTOs throughout the industry.

Filling the talent gaps

46% stated that they are relying on external work partners to meet IT goals. Results also showed that IT leaders are aware of the need for people-oriented changes and more open hiring policies to plug these gaps throughout the year.

To grow teams and fill hiring gaps in 2023, 60% of respondents indicated that they would hire individuals with less experience or skills but an enthusiasm to learn.

Other strategies indicated in the report include a focus on hiring remote or overseas workers (50%) and cross-skilling or upskilling existing workers (39%).

Some firms are also entering into agreements with universities to drive candidates towards skills and careers in high demand, with 48% of those surveyed having indicated that this is an option they will pursue.

Universities can play a key role in boosting digital skills, as well as in fixing the gender bias in STEM roles to improve the overall range of talent available to businesses.

Changing strategies to adopt more flexible work arrangements is also an area that could improve onboarding for businesses. 38% of respondents stated that demands made by high-ranking staff to return to the office were a primary deterrent for potential recruits.

Beyond hiring challenges, executive teams are looking at a range of ways to ensure that current employees have the necessary skills without putting them at risk of burnout.

This is a crucial goal for IT leaders in a tech landscape still impacted by the so-called ‘great resignation’ and prolonged skill shortages of the past few years, and 47% plan on retraining internal staff in 2023.

A number of strategies have been implemented by firms to combat each challenge faced. 52% of respondents stated that they plan to encourage staff to learn skills via virtual training courses, while 46% identified the importance of checking line managers receive training on new technologies and on how to help employees adapt to these.

Reskilling and upskilling workers can be a crucial method for improving employee satisfaction and retention, as it represents a meaningful investment in one’s workforce.

The UK government’s digital transformation is being held back by out-of-date technology, budget constraints, and hiring hurdles, civil servants have said.

Half of all 1,006 surveyed civil servants said that legacy technology is no longer fit for purpose and that it was limited by budget constraints.

Additionally, half of those working on related programmes said that a lack of skills that are especially important for digital transformation is an evident problem, owing to difficulties in hiring the right talent.

37% said they have very few or no skills or knowledge in how AI, machine learning, and automation can be used to improve public service delivery, for example, while 39% lack skills in deploying or migrating apps on cloud infrastructure.

The majority of civil servants (58%) agreed their department is not equipped with the right resources, tools, and skills to use technology to transform public services.

Despite more than three-quarters (78%) reporting interest in receiving training in new digital skills, less than a fifth (19%) said they had any internal or external training in the last two years, the report from Global Government Forum, supported by Google Cloud, revealed.

"Our vision is that by 2025, the UK government will be a transformed more efficient digital government that provides better outcomes for everyone,” said Megan Lee, CEO at the Central Digital and Data Office (CCDO) and head of the Digital, Data, and Technology function at the UK government.

“A central tenet of that mission is in equipping civil servants for a digital future: focused on upskilling digital and data capability and ensuring access to the right data and tools to do the job effectively. CDDO leads the Digital, Data and Technology profession, and we are fully committed to empowering all government departments to attract and build digital talent at scale.”

Lee added that CDDO is meeting the demand to provide digital skills training to civil servants through its roadmap for digital and data. It has committed to upskill at least 90% of senior civil servants on digital and data essentials, as well as deepen the skills of DDaT professionals who will undertake training at least once a year. The roadmap also aims to ensure that all departments meet the definition of “good” for agile ways of working.

The CDDO also launched the Autumn of Digital Learning in September, where senior leaders can access development opportunities and masterclasses.

“And, we’ve launched the Digital and Data Essentials, a core set of capabilities that all civil servants should strive to have. CDDO has also assessed product-centric ways of working across many high-volume services, identifying opportunities to further strengthen the way in which the government uses Agile at scale,” she said.

The National Audit Office (NAO) has found that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) does not have enough employees with the right digital skills to support its digital strategy.

The MoD said it is finding it hard to recruit and retain talent, as it is unable to match the kind of salaries offered by the private sector, and because the pay scales available to digital specialists in government vary, the NAO stated in its review published on Friday.

Technologists also view the MoD as bureaucratic, and the hiring process, including getting security clearance, as too lengthy.

The NAO has reviewed the MoD’s Defence Digital Strategy, which is aiming to achieve three strategic outcomes by 2025 to adapt to the rigid digitisation of warfare.

First, it’s aiming to create a digital backbone, where it will have the right technology, people, and organisational processes to allow the MoD to share data easily and securely with decision-makers across defence.

It also hopes to create a digital foundry, a software and data analytics development centre. Finally, the MoD is planning on creating an empowered digital function, which is a skilled and agile community of digital specialists.

The shortfall of technical skills is undermining the delivery of both individual programmes and the strategy, the report found. Defence Digital, the team responsible for digitising the MoD, is trying several approaches to fix its skills gap, but its progress has taken longer than planned.

“The Digital Strategy for Defence aims to transform capabilities through people, technology and data. If implemented successfully, it should support the seamless sharing of data and coordinated decision making needed for modern warfare,” said Gareth Davies, head of the NAO.

“However, the MoD faces ongoing challenges with its implementation of major technology programmes and acquiring scarce digital skills. The MoD needs a clear plan for prioritising resources to where they are needed most urgently if it is to deliver its ambitions for digital transformation.”

The NAO said the strategy is consistent with good practice it has identified across government. It added that the government hasn’t always understood the quality of its data, has not prioritised its use, and has tolerated data that is not fit for purpose. The strategy recognised that data is a strategic asset and that people and processes are as vital as technology to successful digital change.

The MoD found that its data is hard to access and share, it has gaps in critical skills, its core technology needs updating, and its processes are out of date. Defence Digital estimated it will spend £11.7 billion over 10 years updating or replacing legacy systems, and upgrading to modern replacements will be complex, said the NAO.

The NAO also said that the nature of the MoD’s business creates additional challenges to implementing the strategy. It said the ministry has three security classifications, Official, Secret, and Above Secret, which sometimes require separate digital systems.

The MoD also shares data with international partners and must be able to work with their technology and security policies, adding to the challenge of modernising and integrating technology.

Moreover, Defence Digital’s project delivery has historically suffered from a lack of skilled and experienced personnel, insufficient reporting and assurance, and a culture focused on approvals rather than outcomes. This has undermined trust in its delivery of the strategy, said the NAO.

To implement the strategy by the target data of 2025, the NAO recommends that the MoD should immediately create a delivery plan for the strategy, This should make clear how the strategy integrates with its wider objectives and identifies and prioritises all the activities needed to achieve the strategy’s outcomes. It should also identify what people, skills and funding will be needed and sets clear performance indicators for the strategy’s progress.

Tech skills in the UK are lagging behind most of Europe, according to a new report from the online course provider Coursera.

Coursera’s Global Skills report draws data from 100 million learners in over 100 countries who have used the online platform to develop a new skill in the past year. It benchmarks three of the most in-demand skill areas driving employment in the digital economy: Business, technology, and data science.

The report said that tech companies in the UK are on the upswing, with new records for investment in four of the last five years. It said that the UK is the largest technology market, behind only the US and China, with particular strengths in AI, biotech, cyber security, and fintech.

However, it said this industry requires high levels of talent, and the country may be at risk of falling behind. Learners in the UK scored highly on finance and marketing but performed less well in strategy and operations along with leadership and management. Its rank for technology was 42, up a place from last year, while its rank for data science was 28, up four places.

UK skills proficiency levels

“Of all the countries in the G7, the United Kingdom faces the most difficult economic circumstances. In addition to continuing challenges in implementing Brexit, the country is also behind on workforce development,” the report underlined. “According to McKinsey, to realise the full benefits of reskilling, more than 90% of U.K. workers will need to be retrained. Workforce development leaders should make this a top priority.”

The report also found that Europe leads the world in skills proficiency. Seven of the top ten performing countries in this year’s report are located in Europe. In addition, for the second year in a row, learners in Switzerland achieved the highest level of aggregate skills proficiency.

The top 10 countries named in the report and their skill proficiencies

Although the U.S. held steady in its overall skills proficiency ranking, it lost meaningful ground in core technology and data science skills. In last year’s report, learners in the U.S. ranked 29th in the world, which they maintained this year. However, while their proficiency in business skills rose, learners in the U.S. fell behind other high-income countries in several key technology and data science skills, including software engineering, cloud computing, and mathematics.

Coursera also found that lower levels of internet access mean lower levels of skills proficiency. “The internet may be the great equaliser, but internet access is not equal,” stated the report. “Countries in the lowest 25% of learner performance had average internet access rates of 54.2%, while those in the highest 25% had access rates of 83.6%.”

Lastly, proficiency in technology and data science skills varied widely across the Asia-Pacific region. Propelled by learners who perform the best in the world in technology and data science skills, Indonesia rose 39 positions in this year’s aggregate skills proficiency rankings. However, in other parts of the region, like India, Taiwan, and the Philippines, learners slid backwards in the digital skills needed to power modernization and growth.

Businesses of every size and in every industry are experiencing a jump in skills shortages, with a recent IOD survey finding that 36% of businesses report skills shortages are having a negative impact on their operations. The accelerated pace of transformation brought on by COVID-19 has caused the already high demand for digital skills to even further outstrip supply. Organisations that were already fighting for digital talent pre-pandemic are now having to compete with those that are shifting products, services and processes online.

The situation is so serious that a recent Open University survey found that more than three-quarters (77%) of organisations in the UK are grappling with a digital skills gap. More than two thirds (69%) put this down to not being able to find and recruit staff with the desired skills, while 62% said they're struggling to upskill their current workforce to close this gap. This is an issue that’s particularly prevalent in the world of IT where technical skills including cyber security, software development and network engineering are found to be significantly lacking.

In short, the digital skills gap has become a digital skills crisis.

Challenges into opportunities

Until recently, much of the focus on closing the UK’s digital skills gap focused on traditional education – encouraging, empowering, and equipping the next generation of workers to develop digital skills from a young age. While this is set to address future gaps, it doesn’t do much to shift the dial today. Employers need to make upskilling opportunities available to existing staff, or open the door to lifelong learning for those wishing to reskill into a digital role.

In a bid to make more immediate and real-world impact, the majority (93%) of UK businesses have taken steps to improve digital skills in-house, via training courses, partnerships and apprenticeships, according to research by the CBI.

The Open University's survey also found that almost half (48%) of business leaders believe upskilling their staff will drive profitability. Some 46% think it will improve productivity and 45% believe it will make their company more competitive. Upskilling was also cited by respondents as a way to avoid expensive new hires by a further 48% of survey participants.

Resource, unfortunately, remains one of the biggest barriers to the success of such initiatives. There are many training options available and all of these need to be balanced against the needs of the business and the personal commitments and job roles of employees. Finding high-quality, accredited, recognised and industry-focused courses – especially courses suitable for all stages of employment – is another hurdle.

For individuals, gaining basic on-the-job skills is one thing, but having a qualification widely recognised by other employers improves their future prospects, as well as their existing ones. This also makes it possible for would-be employers to understand which skills – and to what level – candidates have.

Introducing Higher Technical Qualifications (HTQs)

In a move to help solve skills challenges, the UK Government recently introduced Higher Technical Qualifications (HTQs). HTQs are qualifications, such as Foundation Degrees or Diplomas of Higher Education, that have been approved by the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education. Available in England, they are designed to meet the occupational standards for their relevant sectors and each programme has been developed in collaboration with employers and businesses. This means that students – from school leavers to adults – get the specific training, knowledge and skills that employers actually want and need.

Compared to more informal or bite-sized in-house training options and online courses, HTQs provide a high-quality alternative, based on the same employer-developed occupational standards as apprenticeships without the need to find employment as an apprentice. Depending on the course and provider, HTQs can be studied full or part-time, with funding from the UK Government available for people looking to retrain and upskill around other commitments.

“As organisations continue to rely more and more on digital capability, [our survey] shows that it can be challenging to recruit staff into digital roles and keep existing employees up to date with relevant digital skills,” said Jacky Hinton, Director of Apprenticeships and HTQs at The Open University.

“The Open University is proud to be one of the first institutions to offer HTQs in Network Engineering and Software Development, which as the results show, are some of the roles that employers lack and are finding it challenging to recruit for.”

The Network Engineering and Software Development courses have been designed around professional practice in the industry. What’s more, they both build a foundation of computing, mathematical knowledge and skills, before progressing to the fundamental technologies and techniques relevant to the roles in question.

Gaining the advantage

HTQs give their staff the specific knowledge and digital skills to drive their business forward. They help produce highly motivated, trained employees and improve staff retention, all while enabling the business to address the digital transformation of products, services and processes. Benefits that could make or break businesses of the future.

The demand for digital skills is showing no signs of stopping, and neither are the mass resignations being seen worldwide. Businesses that are proactive in their approach to solving the skills crisis will make themselves much more attractive to both current and prospective employees. This, ultimately, gives them a competitive edge among other benefits.

Explore The Open University’s HTQs

Python has firmly established itself as a cornerstone programming language, celebrated for its remarkable versatility and developer-friendly syntax. Its widespread adoption across diverse industries is a testament to its power and ease of use, making it an essential skill for IT professionals. Whether you're embarking on your coding journey or looking to expand your existing skillset, Python, in tandem with other top programming languages, offers a gentle learning curve combined with the depth required for complex applications.

As a general-purpose language, Python's applications are extensive. While prominently used in web development to power server-side logic for countless online services, its reach extends far beyond. Today, Python is integral to cutting-edge fields such as data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, where its robust libraries and frameworks enable sophisticated data analysis and model development. It's also a go-to language for automation scripting, helping to streamline IT operations and repetitive tasks across systems.

Beyond these prominent areas, Python is leveraged in game development, building network tools, creating prototypes for new software, and even in embedded systems. Major technology corporations routinely use Python for testing and building critical components of their products. Its utility isn't confined to tech-centric roles either; finance and accounting professionals increasingly use Python for data manipulation and automating calculations, underscoring its broad appeal and practical value.

Popular uses of Python include:

• Website and software development
• Task automation
• Data analysis
• Data visualization
• Web development and frameworks
• Embedded systems
• Graphic design
• Network development
• Rapid application development
• Testing
• Automation scripting

Is Python development a good career?

The demand for skilled Python developers remains exceptionally high in 2025, solidifying its status as a rewarding career path. Employers across diverse industries actively seek Python expertise, leading to competitive compensation packages. This sustained demand is largely fuelled by Python's critical role in rapidly expanding fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, and web development, ensuring that proficiency in the language continues to be an asset for IT professionals.

In the US, Python developers command impressive salaries. As of early to mid-2025, data from Talent.com indicates an average Python developer salary of approximately $125,111 per year, with entry-level positions starting around $105,052 and experienced workers earning up to $156,149. Reinforcing this, Salary.com reported an average for Entry Level Python Developers at $122,695 as of May 2025.

Across the United Kingdom, Python developers also benefit from strong earning potential, though figures vary by region. IT Jobs Watch indicated a median UK salary of £85,000 as of May 2025. In London, experienced developers (3-5 years) can expect salaries ranging from £85,000 to £105,000 according to Morgan McKinley's 2025 Salary Guide. Roles outside the capital, such as in Manchester, typically see averages for developers of £69,962, as suggested by data from Indeed.com.

Python's dominance is further evidenced by its top ranking among programming languages. GitHub's Octoverse reports from late 2024 and early 2025 consistently show Python as the most used language, driven significantly by its indispensable role in the AI and machine learning boom – fields that saw nearly 100% growth in related GitHub projects in 2024. Coupled with its famously gentle learning curve and a vast, supportive global community, Python remains an accessible yet powerful choice for both aspiring and established developers looking to thrive.

What are the best Python courses?

If you’re interested in learning Python, the best courses can help you master the language and put it into use with a range of complimentary technologies.

The Complete Python Bootcamp from Zero to Hero in Python

Best online Python course for beginners

Provider: Udemy

Price: Udemy courses are frequently discounted. List prices can range from $100−200, but sales often reduce this to $15-30. Udemy also offers a "Personal Plan" subscription for access to a curated collection of courses.

Course link: The Complete Python Bootcamp from Zero to Hero in Python

Course length: 22 hours

This highly-rated and comprehensive course by Jose Portilla is continually updated to teach modern Python 3. It's designed to take absolute beginners to a proficient level through numerous hands-on coding exercises, covering everything from Python installation and basic syntax to advanced features like object-oriented programming, modules, and error handling. Completing this bootcamp provides a strong foundation for further specialization.

30 Days of Python | Unlock your Python Potential

Best intensive online Python course

Provider: Udemy

Price: Subject to Udemy's dynamic pricing and frequent sales (often available for $15−30 during promotions, from a higher list price).

Course link: 30 Days of Python | Unlock your Python Potential

Course length: 9.5 hours

For those seeking a focused and practical introduction, this course by Justin Mitchel offers a hands-on approach to learning Python 3. It covers core programming concepts and quickly moves into practical applications, such as working with CSV files for data tasks. By the end, students will be equipped to tackle projects like web scraping, gaining valuable, real-world skills.

Advanced Python: Language Features

Best online Python course on LinkedIn Learning

Provider: LinkedIn Learning

Price: Included with a LinkedIn Learning subscription (typically around $29.99/month billed annually or $39.99/month billed monthly; a one-month free trial is often available). Individual course purchase prices vary.

Course link: Advanced Python: Language Features

Course link: Advanced Python: Language Features

Course length: 2 hours 30 mins

LinkedIn Learning offers a variety of specialized "Advanced Python" courses taught by industry experts. These courses delve into topics such as advanced object-oriented programming, concurrency, metaprogramming, and efficient data structures. They are ideal for developers looking to deepen their understanding of Python's more powerful features and write more sophisticated, optimized code.

Python and Django Full Stack Web Developer Bootcamp

Best online Python course for web development

Provider: Udemy

Price: Subject to Udemy's dynamic pricing and frequent sales (often available for $20−40 during promotions, from a higher list price).

Course link: Python and Django Full Stack Web Developer Bootcamp

Course length: 32 hours

This comprehensive bootcamp by Jose Portilla guides learners through building complete web applications using Python and the latest stable versions of the Django framework. It covers front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) alongside back-end development, database integration, and REST API creation. It's an excellent choice for those aiming for a full-stack web development career using Python.

AI Programming with Python

Best online Python course for using AI

Provider: Udacity

Price: Udacity Nanodegrees typically operates on a monthly subscription (e.g., around $249−399/month) or offers a bundled price for the estimated program duration. Check Udacity for current pricing and promotions.

Course link: AI Programming with Python

Course length: 3 months (around 10 hours per week)

This Nanodegree program is designed to provide a strong foundation in AI programming using Python. It covers essential data science libraries (NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib), machine learning concepts, and deep learning with PyTorch. Students learn to build and train neural networks, including an introduction to advanced architectures like Transformers, preparing them for more specialized AI roles.

Python Programmer

Best online Python course for those wanting a bit of everything

Provider: Datacamp

Price: Datacamp uses a subscription model (Standard or Premium), with monthly or discounted annual payments. Premium plans often range from $15−30 per month when billed annually. Check Datacamp for current pricing.

Course link: Python Programmer

Course length: 67 hours

Datacamp's "Python Programmer" Career Track offers a structured path for individuals aiming to build a career in programming with Python, even with no prior experience. It covers fundamental Python concepts, data structures, object-oriented programming, and then progresses to practical applications like web scraping and working with APIs, all through an interactive, hands-on learning platform.

Data Scientist with Python

Best online Python course for data science

Provider: Datacamp

Price: Datacamp subscription model (see Python Programmer track above for typical pricing structure).

Course link: Data Scientist with Python

Course length: 90 hours

Specifically tailored for aspiring data scientists, this extensive Career Track from Datacamp teaches how to use Python for data manipulation (Pandas), data visualization (Matplotlib, Seaborn), statistical analysis, machine learning (Scikit-learn), and an introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP). The interactive exercises and real-world projects help solidify understanding and build a portfolio.

Learn Python Programming Masterclass

Best online Python course for software development

Provider: Udemy

Price: Subject to Udemy's dynamic pricing and frequent sales (often available for $20−40 during promotions, from a higher list price).K)

Course link: Learn Python Programming Masterclass

Course length: 74 hours

This detailed masterclass by Tim Buchalka's Learn Programming Academy is designed for both beginners and existing programmers wanting to master Python 3 for software development. It covers a vast range of topics from basic syntax to advanced concepts like object-oriented programming, database interaction, web development basics (e.g., with Flask), and GUI development. While it may offer context on Python 2 for legacy understanding, the primary focus is on modern Python 3 practices.

If you have ambitions to become a professional software developer, this course will give you a foundation to build upon. And existing programmers will also benefit by expanding the languages they are proficient in.

Python for Everybody Specialization

Best online Python course for data visualization

Provider: Coursera

Price: Courses can often be audited for free. To earn a certificate and access all graded assignments, Coursera Specializations typically require a monthly subscription (around $49-79/month for the Specialization, or access via a Coursera Plus subscription). Financial aid may be available.

Course link: Python for Everybody Specialization

Course length: 2 months (10 hours per week)

This highly respected Specialization from the University of Michigan, taught by Dr. Charles Severance ("Dr. Chuck"), is an excellent entry point into Python and computer science. The five-course series covers Python 3 basics, data structures, accessing web data (APIs, JSON, XML), using databases with Python, and culminates in a capstone project involving data retrieval, processing, and visualization. It's renowned for its clear explanations and practical approach.

Technology professionals play a vital role in today’s digital economy, and demand for their skills is growing. Yet research from CWJobs shows that only 29% of IT workers plan to remain in their current roles over the next year.

There are several reasons for this. Some tech experts are considering moving to another business (14%), while others are looking to set up their own company (11%), switch to a part-time role (11%), relocate (11%), seek contract work (10%) or even quit the industry completely (8%). In the face of these challenges, how can organisations retain tech talent?

Taking action

The formula for retaining talent in the technology sector doesn’t differ greatly from other industries, according to McAfee Enterprise EMEA president Adam Philpott. But thanks to a buoyant labour market and current supply-versus-demand dynamics, it requires thoughtfulness, thoroughness and attention.

“It’s important for employers to find individual targets for each employee. This should be something that stretches them to learn, grow and gain new experiences, while supporting them in being and feeling successful, as well as allowing for failures from which they can learn along the way,” he explains.

“Honest, open communication also plays a crucial part in personal development plans. And these plans should align with the career wants and prospects of the individual, and what the company needs from them.”

It’s equally important to ensure that career growth opportunities exist. “If organisations can upskill employees internally and set up returnship programmes for those looking for a career change within the sector, employees will feel that they can grow within the company,” Philpott says.

It’s also important that any employee retention initiatives are meaningful to all involved, from the business as a whole to the individual employee, as well as to clients. Teams should be rewarded and celebrated for successes, but those achievements must be concrete and challenging.

There’s a balance to be struck, however, on just how challenging these goals should be: Employees in overstretched IT teams often become stressed and look for a move as a result.

Philpot believes that employers can prevent this with the help of technology. “Automation can take on manual, time-consuming tasks while simplifying and accelerating threat response, so IT teams can spend their time on more value-based, innovative tasks,” he says.

One final, simple way to encourage IT workers to stay is by ensuring they receive fair pay – something that’s a chronic problem in the tech industry. Philpott says McAfee offers pay parity for employees who work in identical roles at the same level and location, which has helped to ensure equality within its business.

Understanding employee needs and expectations

After more than a year of closure due to the pandemic, offices around the world are starting to reopen. But IT staff, like those in many other industries, may well wish to continue working flexibly in the foreseeable future.

Dave Prezzano, managing director, United Kingdom & Ireland, HP, urges businesses to support this. “Tech companies must be relentlessly people-focused, and appreciate that the future of work is no longer simply nine-to-five,” he says.

“Whether it’s offering remote working, flexible hours to accommodate school pick-up times or encouraging employees to take mental health breaks, tech companies must create environments that empower employees to focus on their personal and work lives.”

He says that HP attracts and retains staff by creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive working environment. “Through ongoing employee development, comprehensive compensation and benefits, and a focus on health and wellbeing, we strive for an environment where employees want to continue their career journey with us, to thrive and succeed.”

Prezzano also points out that improving gender diversity in the tech sector can enable firms to retain more staff. “With an astounding 50% of women leaving their tech careers by the age of 35, companies must examine flexible working policies and create better routes back to work for women who have left the industry to focus on other aspects of their lives,” he adds.

Other considerations

With the rise of remote working and a surge in cyber attacks, technology professionals have seen their workloads grow exponentially during the pandemic. It’s been a stressful time all around, and they expect employers to be empathetic.

Nazir Ul-Ghani, head of Workplace from Facebook EMEA, advises: “To retain talent for the long-term – whether that’s in the tech industry or beyond – it’s up to leaders to show up authentically for their people, create spaces for two-way dialogue and truly listen to the needs of the workforce.”

David Webb, CEO of 6point6, suggests that companies can fill the current skills gaps by giving existing staff opportunities to try new roles in the business. He explains: “Professional mobility gives employees reasons to stay longer. Through training as well as the freedom to sample different departments, you’re giving employees the challenge they’re looking for, plus valuable knowledge from the experts in each of those areas.”

The coronavirus pandemic has shown how essential technology professionals are and their demand will no doubt reach even higher levels in the years to come. Companies need to do all they can to support and retain their IT talent, or employees could jump ship to another company – or leave the industry altogether.

Last autumn, following a difficult six months of redundancies and furloughs that hit the arts and culture sector particularly hard, a governmental campaign encouraging people to retrain to work in the tech industry was met with heavy criticism from the public. The ad showed a young dancer named Fatima tying up her ballet shoes, likely in preparation for rehearsal, with the message “Fatima’s next job could be in cyber. (she just doesn’t know it yet)” overlaid on the left of the image. In the end, the campaign became so unpopular (not to mention thoroughly ridiculed) that it was ultimately scrapped and the government forced to apologise.

Although it was probably not the main intention by design, the ad became a symbol of the way the arts and culture sectors are seen as frivolous, held in less respect than the supposedly more responsible and important STEM subjects. Last year, arts and design, which could well have been the course studied by the person hired by the government to create the infamous campaign, was ranked ninth out of the ten most popular university subjects, according to QS World University Rankings by Subject. Computer science and information systems and engineering and technology topped the list, while humanities subjects such as history, languages, literature, and philosophy, were nowhere to be seen. This shouldn't come as a surprise: Many young people considering studying Arts & Humanities are advised not to pursue this path, as it’s stereotypically seen as a fast track to unemployment or redundancy, as seen during the pandemic. In fact, if you imagine a hypothetical usefulness spectrum dictated by the economy, humanities are going to be on the opposite end from subjects such as maths, computer science, and chemistry.

Two Cultures

Long-time NASA engineer Peter Scott uses a metaphor of driving a car to illustrate the divide between those who are in the tech industry and those who aren’t.

“The fact is that it's a matter of perspective, and this perspective came to me after driving my children everywhere. They have to sit in the back seat all the time and when one of them gets old enough, and they get to ride in the front seat once in a while, it's like: ‘Oh, you can see so much more here’.”

In a world that is rapidly progressing with new technologies, being “outside” of STEM is a bit like being driven around in a car while being forced to sit in the back seat.

“There are insiders and outsiders in every industry, but the tech industry is the one that's doing the most to reshape where we're going,” he says. “For everyone else, it's like: We don't know where we're going’. [The driver] seems to think you know where you're going, but you're not giving us a good enough picture of it.”

After three decades at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Scott decided to embark on a more human-facing career of public speaking, which he describes as “scarier and less likely to happen than jumping out of a plane”. However, he also notes that he managed to achieve both. Nowadays, he blends being a business coach and successful TEDx speaker with contracting for NASA.

“I'm balancing both of these worlds because I want and need to be able to see both sides at the same time. Engineers and scientists, we tend to get locked into a certain view of the world that's driven by the equations and the principles that we know and the natural laws that explain everything. And you can't say that it doesn't, because that's the principle of science,” he says.

However, while science may be the vanguard of change, if taken in isolation it “leaves out a whole perspective that's driven by poetry, emotion, and artistic values”, notes Scott.

“Because they're not quantifiable and measurable, they get not so much disdained as just ignored by scientists and tech people. It doesn't get you where you need to go as a tech person, so you can't afford to spend time on that. So these worlds are like C P Snow’s Two Cultures – they’re growing, if anything, further apart,” he warns.

From Philosophy to Data Science

The gap between the two separate cultures of humanities and STEM is especially visible in the evolving technology of artificial intelligence, which is becoming more present in everyday life in our phones, workplaces, and even supermarkets.

“Our journey with AI especially is one that requires a common understanding,” says Scott. “We can't advance this technological agenda that upends everyone's life – in a largely, and hopefully, positive way – without understanding both sides, without finding the bridge between those two cultures.”

Although AI is treated as inherently technological, last year’s events have proven that it’s also a major ethical issue. Nevertheless, despite University of Oxford physicist David Deutsch predicting in 2012 that “philosophy will be the key that unlocks artificial intelligence”, the New College of the Humanities (NCH) is so far the only university in the UK to offer a joint degree in philosophy and artificial intelligence. Dr Brian Ball, who is the head of NCH’s philosophy faculty and an associate professor, tells IT Pro that the degree was launched after the school partnered with the Boston-based Northeastern University.

“We are quite proud of our MA in Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence, and some of our related degrees, such as our MSc AI with a Human Face, and our various bachelor's degrees with humanities majors and data science minors,” he says. “They are prompted in part by our joining the global network of Northeastern University, where interdisciplinarity and the cultivation of human, data, and technological literacies are central to higher education, and partly by the intrinsic merits of studying these subjects together.”

AI can benefit from at least two of these merits, according to Ball, with philosophy able to provide the technology with ethicality as well as explainability. This is particularly crucial at a time when facial recognition is increasingly under fire for being prone to unethical usage.

However, AI isn’t the only field where philosophy might be useful. Over the last five years, Exasol chief data and analytics officer Peter Jackson recruited plenty of data scientists, but not all of them come from a traditional IT or data science background. In fact, he says the best data scientist to ever be a part of one of his teams, who was creative, curious, and could turn insights into compelling arguments, didn't hold a degree in computing or data science, but in philosophy. Jackson says that, when recruiting, he doesn’t only look at candidates’ technical skills and their ability to understand data, but also their storytelling skills. This specific ability can be found in “somebody who's done English literature, who is very good at writing poems and stories, and building a coherent argument,” Jackson says.

“I need them to be able to interpret the output of that piece of work, either to me, or the rest of the team, or to stakeholders,” he tells IT Pro. “If they can only go so far, and they have to hand [it] over to somebody else to tell the story, you can get a disconnect. The person who's telling the story might not be able to answer some of the technical questions that may arise: ‘What training set did you use?’ or ‘Where did that data come from?’. So I try to recruit data scientists who are able to at least tell the first part of the story of their work.”

However, Jackson notes that finding people with both data science and storytelling skills is “very hard”.

“Sometimes, because of particular skills that you need from the data science point of view, you quite often compromise on that. And that's where you do need the professional storytellers, professional writers who can support it,” he adds.

Asked about his thoughts on the split between STEM sciences and humanities, Jackson says that he doesn’t see it as a dichotomy.

“I don’t think there should be a divide. I think as a society, as an economy, we need smart, educated people – and I think that is the priority.”

For many years, the tech industry has been complaining about a shortage of technical skills in areas from cloud platforms to container architectures. But while the tech skills gap remains a persistent concern, there is another skills shortage that's being overlooked by businesses.

The UK is falling behind in its level of 'human-centric' business skills, according to a new report, including HR and communications. As organisations seek to outfit themselves for a largely uncharted world of hybrid working, we're joined by Anthony Tattersall, head of EMEA at online training provider Coursera, to examine whether we're in danger of putting too much focus on STEM skills, and how companies can avoid over-correcting.

Footnotes

• Female enrolment in STEM courses increased to 46% in 2020
• Remote workers spend more hours on the job, finds ONS
• IT Pro Panel: The loneliness of the long-distance worker
• Learn to code online with these six websites
• IT Pro Panel: Why CIOs have embraced hybrid working
• The softer skills CIOs will need to adopt for the future
• What are your tech skills worth?
• CIO hiring process to focus on emotional intelligence in 2021
• Why IT projects fail and how to make yours a success
• Game on: How playing video games could level up your career
• How to become a T-shaped employee
• The STEM skills gap — crisis averted?
• How do I best support my remote workers?
• Why COVID-19 could spur a learning revolution
• Onboarding during the pandemic and beyond
• Why the number of students taking GCSE IT has fallen and how it can be reversed
• How to become a data scientist
• Why you should prioritise employee experience
• 17.1 million Brits lack essential digital skills for work
• Government launches 400 free qualifications to help with economic recovery
• Upskilling a remote workforce
• The IT Pro Podcast: Why the tech skills gap doesn't exist
• The best time to prepare for remote working was six months ago

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Over the coming years, businesses and organisations will increasingly face a shortage of technology professionals because not enough young people are studying IT-related courses. There’s been a 40% decrease in students taking part in GCSE IT courses in the last six years. While 147,000 young people were studying GCSE ICT in 2015, this fell to 88,000 last year, according to a recent report from the Learning and Work Institute.

As many young people choose not to study IT subjects in school, demand for digital and technical skills is growing across all industries. In fact, the Learning and Work Institute report found that 60% of businesses believe they’ll become more reliant on advanced digital skills in the next five years. So, why are students shunning technology-based courses, and what will it take to fix this growing issue?

A growing issue

Despite fewer students taking up GCSE IT courses in recent years, experts warn that the government and educational bodies are failing to improve the ICT curriculum in the UK. Nigel Abbott, regional director of north EMEA at GitHub, says: “It is of course concerning that young people are steering away from IT GCSE. But unless the UK curriculum addresses the fundamental shortcomings in the way it teaches IT, this will not change. Students are currently being taught technical specifics that, by the time they take the next step in education or enter the workforce, are quickly outdated.”

Abbott believes that technically minded problem solvers are in growing demand by businesses today and that this should be reflected in the classroom. “So, IT GCSEs must focus on teaching young people how to think not what to think. Only by equipping them with techniques to think like coders will they learn how to solve complex IT problems. This approach would be beneficial for students, potential employers and the future of IT.”

Graham Hunter, VP of skills at CompTIA, points out that many young people don’t understand what a career in IT really means. As a result, they may be put off studying academic courses in the area – what he terms a “confidence gap”. He tells IT Pro: “Without sufficient role models, students often end up leaning on stereotypes like having to be good at maths for a career in technology.”

He says determining the right career path while in mainstream education can be a significant struggle, too. “When it comes to specialist vocational subjects like IT, introducing other progression options, such as apprenticeships and industry qualifications, can help to ignite and drive interest in IT earlier on in a student’s educational journey,” explains Hunter.

"Early exposure to IT careers for students is essential to promoting an interest in IT from more young people. UK businesses can facilitate this is by providing better, alternative ways for aspiring professionals to develop their skills, such as work experience or apprenticeships."

A wake-up call

The dramatic fall in students choosing to take computing GCSEs at a time when UK organisations continue to accelerate their digital strategies should be a wake-up call for educational institutions and businesses, says Jen Rodvold, head of digital ethics and tech for good at Sopra Steria.

Her view is that businesses need to work on several fronts to ward off a detrimental digital skills shortage. “Employers should increase their work with schools and colleges, sharing information with administrators and educators on what skills they are seeking in the short and medium terms to help shape employment-relevant curriculum,” she says. “They also need to send role models into classrooms to inspire young people by showing them the range of opportunities and the diversity of people working in tech.”

Rodvold says employers can also address skills shortages by reducing unnecessary barriers to roles, such as ensuring entry-level jobs and apprenticeships are open to people of all backgrounds, including those without a degree. “It is no longer acceptable to say a job is ‘entry level’ when it requires significant skills and a level of education that may not have been accessible to all,” she explains.

Business leaders and recruiters must also understand what kind of transferable skills from both inside and outside their industry can be considered from job applicants in order to close the skills gap.

“It’s critical for businesses to accept that, while STEM education is a great foundation for learning, continuous on-the-job training is incredibly valuable. In fact, there are a lot of professional or essential skills that are harder to train for than technical skills, so valuing the so-called soft skills, and then providing opportunities to learn new digital skills, is a great way to invest in people,” says Rodvold.

She adds that although there is no single silver bullet solution for inspiring students to take GCSE IT, this only further highlights the need for the organisations looking to plug the skills gap to explore as many avenues as possible to reverse the decline.

“Making these changes will not only help fill skills gaps now and serve as an investment towards future skills needs, but it will also help organisations improve their diversity and contribute to greater social mobility,” Rovold concludes.

Businesses taking action

With countless reports of a widening skills gap in the tech industry over the past few years, the fact that GCSE ICT uptake is continuing to decrease will be very worrying for businesses and organisations that depend on technical talent.

Alex Foster, director of insurance, wealth management, and financial services at BT, says: “Any drop in the take up of computing and other STEM subjects is of concern to the technology sector where there is already a growing skills gap.

“While many schools have specialist teachers for subjects like Maths, English and French, few schools in the UK have specialist computing teachers. Teaching IT requires a specialist skill set that can’t easily be filled by one teacher juggling multiple roles.”

But as a business that relies heavily on technical talent, BT is taking several steps to help young people develop a range of STEM skills and encourage them to pursue careers in the technology industry.

“BT’s purpose is to Connect for Good, which means we have a responsibility to do all we can alongside parents and teachers to encourage the take up of STEM. During lockdown, BT and EE mobile worked to increase access to mobile data for students, and continued to work on initiatives to further education in IT,” says Foster.

“Our partnership with Code First Girls provides women with the skills, space and inspiration to break into and excel in the tech industry by providing a community of coders and coaches, while our Skills for Tomorrow initiative with Internet Matters helps parents and families manage online risks while supporting children’s digital wellbeing and skills growth.”

Foster explains that the firm has also worked in partnership with the government, education organisations and technology businesses on the Barefoot Computing initiative, which provides free workshops and online guides to aid primary school teachers in delivering the computing curriculum.

She adds: “By supporting initiatives and showcasing exciting developments in this sector, we hope to increase awareness among young people of the huge array of opportunities that are available when studying computing and other STEM GCSEs.”

The decline in students studying GCSE IT is concerning for all businesses and organisations. But the only way to solve this crisis is by businesses, academic institutions, and the government working together to encourage young people to upskill in technical subjects and enter the technology industry. This will be paramount as more businesses and organisations look to digitally transform.

The tech skills gap is something that gets brought up again and again, as organisations lament their struggles to find talented developers, engineers and security professionals. The problem, so they claim, is that there just aren’t enough potential employees in the industry to meet demand for these positions.

But are companies struggling to fill roles because there aren’t enough qualified candidates, or does the real reason have more to do with hiring practises, company culture and attitudes towards certifications? This week, we’re taking a look at the supposed causes of the skills gap, and why companies are thinking about tech skills in the wrong way.

Footnotes

• The IT Pro Podcast: Picking a programming language
• Turn on, log in, burn out
• Why COVID-19 could spur a learning revolution
• Microsoft will help 1.5 million Brits build careers in tech by 2025
• Bridging the coronavirus skills gap
• The STEM skills gap — crisis averted?
• The IT Pro Podcast: How upskilling can improve diversity
• IBM job ad calls for 12-years of experience with six-year-old Kubernetes
• How do we fix security's toxic culture?
• Taking the road less travelled to a career in IT
• Two thirds of UK organisations facing digital skills gap
• Majority of Brits received no digital training during the pandemic
• Three-quarters of over-45s keen to invest in digital skills
• What should I be looking for when hiring a developer?
• CIO hiring process to focus on emotional intelligence in 2021
• So you want to work for a tech startup? It’s not all ping-pong tables and yoga
• What are your tech skills worth?
• The softer skills CIOs will need to adopt for the future
• 7 skills you need to become a front-end developer

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This article originally appeared in Issue 13 of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To receive each new issue in your inbox, click here.

By 2030, seven million workers could be under-skilled for their job requirements, according to research from the Industrial Strategy Council, or roughly 20% of the current UK workforce. The most severe shortages will be felt in basic digital and STEM skills, as well as core management, and as 80% of 2030’s anticipated workforce already in employment now, young people entering the marketplace won’t be enough to plug this gap.

The Industrial Strategy Council isn’t the only organisation to analyse the problem of skills mismatch in businesses. In its report, ‘The State of Skills 2021: Endangered’, EdTech firm Degreed found that tech skills are the most in demand for professionals across the world, with advanced IT and programming are the most desirable, followed by advanced data analysis, maths, tech design and engineering. Yet, as Sarah Danzl, skills expert at Degreed, explains, many organisations don’t have a firm grasp of the knowledge base already present among their staff.

“To build the skills they need for the future, businesses need an accurate picture of their skills gap. Yet a third (34%) of workers say their manager doesn’t know what skills they have, so businesses don’t have all the information they need to make informed decisions,” she tells IT Pro. “This means the potential to lose skilled workers if companies are forced to make redundancies without full information on their people’s skills. Businesses also risk reduced productivity if existing workers aren't utilising their skills to their fullest.”

The skills gap and the impending impact automation could have on jobs, is colouring the debate about which skills businesses will need in the short to medium term. How the DARQ technologies will influence businesses and the people they will need to take full advantage of these burgeoning technologies, is clearly having a practical impact on jobs. Workers looking to make a change in their working lives in the tech industry would be advised to take a broad view of which skills they need to equip themselves with.

Organisations that value the tech skills their staff have today and are prepared to make potentially significant investments in training, will be the companies that can continue to innovate in a rapidly changing world. In the Hays UK Salary and Recruitment trends report, over a third (36%) of technology employers don't have the talent they need to meet their current project goals.

The skills in most demand are IT infrastructure skills: cloud (56%), software development (54%), and project and change management (39%). When it comes to salaries, 74% of tech employers have increased pay by an average of 1.8%. Employers in the tech sector, though, should take note that nearly half (48%) of survey respondents said they would consider moving to a new employer if the salary or benefits package was attractive. While your business might want to review the salaries of your critical tech employees in light of this information, it’s worth noting that money alone may not be enough. Of the technology professionals who are planning to move jobs in the coming year, 21% said lack of future opportunities was the main motivating factor.

Speaking to IT Pro, James Milligan, global head of technology at HAYS, explains: “Tech skills are highly valued in the UK by virtue of having one of the world’s largest tech sectors. The value of these skills is particularly recognised in tech hubs such as London, Edinburgh, Manchester and Cambridge. The COVID-19 crisis has revealed just how integral tech skills really are: Huge shifts to our ways of working have increased the spotlight on systems and technology, and the skills that go with it.”

Tech skills UK

The value of tech skills will increase significantly in a post-COVID-19 business environment. Existing tech skills will have to be upgraded or at least augmented to meet the needs of employers who, in some cases, have radically altered their business development strategies.

Andrew Duncan, partner and UK CEO at Infosys Consulting, says: “The government’s pledge in the latest Spending Review to boost skills by encouraging millions more young people into further education, extending traineeships and sector-based work and improving the current apprenticeship system is certainly very encouraging. Digital tools, capabilities and security systems are all becoming critical for many firms as they adapt to meet the challenges of a changed market and ‘digital literacy’ will be required across all industries in the UK, from e-commerce to automation in factories.”

While the coronavirus pandemic is impacting skills and working arrangements across the globe, in the UK there’s the added complication of Brexit. According to Danzl, with the EU talent pool shrinking in the country, upskilling will become of paramount importance.

“Potential employees, who might have previously come to London, might choose to move to tech hubs within the EU, such as Amsterdam, Dublin or Paris, as it will be easier to secure work permits,” she says. “If this is the case, then organisations will have to rely more on homegrown talent, and upskilling will be key to achieving this.”

Future-proof your future

For many businesses, living with a chronic shortage of skilled tech workers is not new. Increasingly, to mitigate this problem – if not completely solve it – they are turning to upskilling and reskilling the workers they have. This has several benefits: It can be more cost-effective than hiring a new member of staff and existing staff members are already familiar with the culture and operations of the business.

Some organisations, though, are following the competing trend of using contract or freelance workers to fill roles that require a narrow, specialist skillset. While this can be a quick fix, it overlooks other benefits that upskilling can bring. As Ben Higgin, head of technology and investments at PwC UK explains: “When recruiting for any role, we are of course looking for the technical skills, but life skills are just as essential to fulfil that role.

“There is also a greater understanding of the need for fusion skills, such as collaboration, teamwork and problem solving – all crucial skills for technology innovation, which is so important to the driving growth in the UK economy. I think those are going to be critical skills as increasingly employers are going to look at ways to redeploy their workforce. It's all around the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

For workers, the state of skills study 2021 from Degreed, concludes that 41% of UK workers believe their core job skills will be obsolete within five years. Taking a proactive approach to learning new skills will be vital if they want to ensure their skills remain relevant and in demand.

For example, it’s not enough for a software engineer to know just one programming language. According to Joey Tait, managing director of software engineering recruitment agency Develop, many businesses look for multiple languages across front or backend development to compliment their technology stack.

Building these skills up are something individuals should take responsibility for themselves, too, particularly if their employer isn’t focused on upskilling workers. “There are a whole host of platforms for professionals to get to grips within their own time – Udemy, Coursera, Pluralsight – it’s all about taking initiative and refreshing your soft and technical skills,” says Tait.

Milligan, meanwhile, believes that the surges in demand for different tech skills seen in 2020 will continue into 2021 and beyond. “We’ve experienced such a fast pace of change in our world of work recently which has impacted the tech skills landscape and this shows no sign of slowing down in the upcoming year.

“The search for tech talent will only get fiercer during the next 12 months. Employers will be looking for those candidates who possess strong technical skills but will place an equally important emphasis on soft skills like adaptability and flexibility to help with expected changes and challenges ahead.”

What are tech skills worth? A great deal to businesses starved of the talent they need to continue to innovate. And, importantly, you don’t need a tech degree to apply for and win a highly paid tech job. Many of the leading companies in Silicon Valley have now removed a tech degree as a prerequisite for applications. Being self-taught, which shows a proactive drive to learn, is more valuable to them than a paper qualification. With an array of teaching platforms available, you can learn the tech skills you need to secure your current job or step into the highly paid tech job you have always wanted.

Choosing what you want to do with your life is something that’s both exciting and filled with uncertainty, not least because most people have to make these decisions at a young age, with little in the way of life experience.

As a result, many people find themselves wanting to switch careers later on in life after making what they consider in retrospect to have been the wrong decision.

This isn’t an easy choice either and often those who decide to take the plunge are forced to start from the bottom of the career ladder again. Indeed, it may not have been an active choice in the first place; in a world where there’s increased uncertainty and turbulence in the employment market, it may be disruption such as redundancy or very low pay that cause people to take stock of their career trajectory.

For a growing number, they find a new calling in the IT industry.

Why people change careers to IT

According to research from Harvey Nash, over a third of IT workers, both technical and people-facing, started off in a different career.

It may come as no surprise to hear that one of the primary motivators for this is to pursue better remuneration. The average annual salary for a career in IT in London is £58,000, compared to the national average wage of just £30,000.

There’s also a level of job security not found in many other industries: With over four million IT jobs looking to be filled at any one time across the country, you’re more likely to find and retain a job than in most other careers.

The threat of automation is also somewhat reduced compared to other career pathways. Indeed, one of the often proffered answers to a robot or AI taking your job is to become the person who creates and/or maintains the technology.

How to make the switch

Starting out in IT with no grounding in the field can seem daunting, not least because getting the relevant training without support from an employer can be very expensive. But would-be candidates can be left in a catch-22 position as without such qualifications, employers may pass them over when looking to recruit to IT positions.

According to Eoin Hefferman, CEO at Padlock, a company specialising in cyber security training to those with caregiving responsibilities, this is an error on the part of recruiters.

“It’s too expensive to enter cyber security,” says Hefferman. “You’ll often hear people talk about the need for certain qualifications and I can understand that from a risk mitigation point of view, I’ve been there myself, but we’re overlooking talent.”

Nevertheless, if you have time and money on your side, there is an abundance of training companies in the UK that offer IT certifications in whatever field you’re interested in. No specialist degree necessary, just sign up for the course and with a few certifications under your belt, you’ll be able to kickstart a thriving IT career.

One of the benefits of these kinds of training programmes versus a traditional degree – other than being cheaper – is learners can pick and choose from the wide variety of courses that are on offer, meaning they can tailor their skills to the particular type of career they wish to pursue.

For instance, if an individual decided a career in cyber security is what they want, they could pick up all the necessary certifications through a training provider and bypass the extraneous content that would bulk-up a university curriculum and not be of any interest.

An added benefit of pursuing specific certifications is that often, learners can study flexibly, in their own time and in whatever medium suits them best. For example, those pursuing the CompTIA Security+ certification can choose between classroom learning or online, and full or part-time study. There are also myriad learning resources both free and paid-for that only increase the convenience of home learning even more.

"Employers aren't looking for a particular degree – they're looking to see if you have the right skills in the technologies they need to work with today," says Thomas O'Reilly, head of group strategy at training provider QA. "These industry-recognised qualifications allow you to keep up with advances in technologies, so you have the right skills that make you more employable.”

"Many employers are aligned to specific vendors. They won't just want a cloud engineer, they'll be looking for someone who can work with AWS or Microsoft Azure specifically," he adds. "Going through an accredited training provider allows you to get vendor-specific skills and qualifications that will make you more employable compared to being without that vendor-backed accreditation."

Career change, or career progression?

Pursuing a career in IT doesn’t even have to involve earning any formal qualifications related to the field. There are businesses in the UK that are willing to take people with just the bare minimum IT knowledge and then turning them into computing superstars.

Rob Sandbach’s business is one just like that. Indiespring is a smartphone app development firm that adopts a novel recruitment strategy where many of its employees aren’t from technology backgrounds. The company likes to take enthusiastic individuals, whatever their existing skillset, and train them up from within – teaching its recruits to code apps and websites for its clients.

Upskilling and reskilling a business’ workforce is also becoming a favoured method of acquiring tech talent to fill the vacant tech roles in various departments, so you may not even have to leave your employer in search of further education.

According to a report from Big Data LDN, more than half (57%) of businesses are upskilling their existing workers so they can traverse the skills chasm. It’s an effective way of ensuring you get talent that knows the business well and the method can ensure things like age, gender and neurodiversity are taken into consideration.

Experts have criticised the industry for being less diverse than it was in the 1980s, and with fewer graduates coming through the pipeline, taking valued workers and offering them new and important opportunities within the business is something that at the very least should be seriously considered.

Regardless of how you get into IT, the industry needs fresh talent and there are more than 4 million empty vacancies worldwide, most of which with above average salaries. Pursuing a tech job might seem like a leap into the unknown, but in the coming years there will be people far and wide wishing they had the opportunity to get into tech at a time when it has never been easier to do so.

This article originally appeared in January's edition of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To sign up to receive each new issue in your inbox, click here.

It could be said the number of life-changing decisions you have to make during your tender teenage years is unreasonable. Trusting a freshly minted adult to make the right career decision, the repercussions of which could be felt for the next 50 years, is absurd when you think about it: They’ve only just been legally trusted to open a bank account!

However, the decision of whether to pursue higher education or not, at least in the world of IT, is becoming less crucial – and less black and white – than it has been in the past.

Once scoffed at with derision, apprenticeships and the more contemporary degree apprenticeships are rapidly becoming not only a viable alternative to the more academic degree acquired through painstaking hours in a university library, but a sought-after one in the industry.

So which route should aspiring IT professionals take? And what do employers think?

Degrees vs. apprenticeships: what’s the difference?

The main difference between the two routes into work is the learning model. University has been the traditional route into the IT industry for decades and for those looking to bolster a CV with a prestigious qualification, nothing else has compared.

It’s not a cheap route, either. At the time of writing £9,250 buys you a year of frolicking around a strange city with new people, but it also resigns you to serious hard work. From lecture theatres to seminars and tutorials, plus coursework and exams, anyone choosing this route will have to fit their fun – and any casual jobs to supplement their meagre student loan – around a lot of study on campus and at home.

On the other hand, apprentices can expect much less bookwork and a more hands-on approach to learning. It will involve choosing a specialism early on and then working in that field while being taught everything about the job, starting from the basics.

Degree apprenticeships meld the two paths and involve attending university lectures once a week to help with the theoretical understanding of the job, but most of the learning will be in the field and solving real problems alongside other technology apprentices.

Career prospects and preparedness for work

Traditionally, university degrees were regarded as the pinnacle of achievement and the qualification of choice if you wanted the best chance of getting a professional job. But attitudes are changing, especially in the field of IT, and not just because the industry is in dire need of talent.

Instead there’s an increasing recognition that after a little time in the job, a person’s educational background becomes less and less relevant.

“Just from the grapevine and what you tend to hear from our hiring managers in the early career space is that once [young employees] hit that three-year experience mark, the importance of their degree certification, whether it's a history degree or computer science degree, almost becomes obsolete and insignificant,” says Dan Doherty, graduate and apprentice attraction and recruitment manager at Capgemini.

In addition, if the role is particularly technical, such as a software engineer, then university graduates are already down three-to-four years on apprentices in terms of industry experience by the time they reach the point of applying for an entry-level job, says Doherty.

Fujitsu’s EMEIA head of junior talent, Nick White, has a similar outlook. “With our graduate recruitment, we had done some analysis which investigated whether people who get firsts outperform those who don’t get firsts in our organisation and there was no real correlation,” he says. “So, just because you're good academically doesn't always mean that you will be a great performer in the organisation and in the world of work.”

However, White adds that although apprentices may have the interpersonal workplace skills that university graduates lack when they first enter the workforce, often apprentices are taken on at earlier ages and therefore require more pastoral care while under the company’s watch.

“I think apprenticeships are a viable alternative [to a degree], but I wouldn’t necessarily favour one over the other,” he adds.

Finances and the future

The beauty of the technology industry is that it’s so entrepreneurial and it doesn’t matter which route you took to get into the industry, the hardest workers will always be rewarded. Doherty says Capgemini’s degree apprentices who graduated in 2011 and 2012 have already gone on to get “six-to-seven promotions”, leading teams and entire areas of the business.

From the financial point of view, given equal opportunities within a company a motivated degree apprentice’s situation will be markedly better than a university graduate’s in the earlier years of a career. With no student loan to pay back, they keep the entirety of their net salary, whereas a university graduate will be paying a loan back for years – even decades – after finishing their studies.

But as White says, there probably isn’t one route which is more attractive than the other to an employer, which means the decision ultimately comes down to what best suits the individual. And for recruiters, the opening up of new routes into the tech industry means there’s an even larger pool of talent to choose from, giving the opportunity to hire people who are highly adept but may previously have found the need for a university degree and insurmountable challenge.

Why do staff resign? Some find more interesting propositions elsewhere. Others are tempted by better pay. Everyone retires, eventually. But Zoe Morris, president at Frank Recruitment Group, points out one more factor: “One of the most common reasons for professionals wanting to move on is that their current employer isn’t supporting their development.”

It shouldn’t be hard. Few people are better placed to decide where a team member’s skills are lacking than that member themselves. Listen to what they say and give them the time they need to pursue those areas; yet so many managers still get it wrong.

“Your most valuable workers are ingrained in their own ecosystems and know the niches and skill sets they want to investigate and delve deeper into,” Morris says. That’s why it’s key to “schedule time where they can self-learn, and facilitate the costs involved where possible. Investing time as well as money into your staff’s development is a sure-fire way to drive better retention.”

In short, staff need to feel valued – and helping them to sharpen their skills is one of the most effective ways to do that. In the technology sector, says IT outsourcing service provider Harvey Nash, 95% of staff are working to develop new skills – often in their own spare time.

Yet significant knowledge gaps still need to be plugged. More than half of all organisations struggle with a lack of in-house skills for legacy technology, according to research by Park Place Technologies. A similar number believes the skills gap will impact their sector’s ability to adopt new technologies, and one in ten isn’t confident in its IT infrastructure at all. That’s past, future and present technology equally impacted. Investing in staff development has never been more important.

Skills sharing

Docebo mixes traditional course building with Coach & Share, a social learning platform it introduced in 2016 to facilitate in-house knowledge sharing. By involving the learner in the process of learning, said Docebo product marketing manager Matt Powell, “social learning” – effectively, self-publishing what you know and allowing others to comment on it – leads to higher levels of engagement.

Coach & Share “allows staff to contribute, comment, ask questions and develop subject matter experts internally,” says Powell. “From an L&D manager’s perspective, [getting this kind of engagement] has always been a challenge. Traditionally, learning has been seen as something that staff have to do but we want people to want to learn, and then apply that learning to their job.”

Powell is keen to point out that Docebo’s offering is more than an educational Facebook for Business: it’s underpinned by a high level of artificial intelligence (AI), which both increases the value of the information put into the system and helps managers and team members to identify the most appropriate content.

Coach & Share, which is one part of Docebo’s wider offering, “creates content creators internally by establishing subject aspects within different parts of the business,” says Powell – and much of this is done passively, freeing those experts from any obligation to step aside from their existing responsibilities to manage their colleagues’ learning.

Describing the process as “taking what you’re learning, applying it within the flow of work and sharing the knowledge”, Powell outlines a process whereby a staff member who encountered a problem in their usual course of work would pull out their phone and record how they fixed it – while in the very process of doing so. Other than adding a short commentary or introduction, this shouldn’t greatly extend the time required to remedy the situation. Once they upload the content to Coach & Share, the AI that underpins Docebo’s offering applies what it considers the most relevant tags automatically, helping other team members find it should they come across a similar problem in the future.

“If that piece of content starts to become very relevant to other people in the company, the L&D manager can apply it to their formal learning programme, too,” Powell said – and here, the potential for personalisation, facilitated by AI, comes to the fore. “The system will suggest modules you need to complete based on modules you’ve already worked through. It can also eliminate steps. The learning path isn’t linear as it used to be: if the system can see that you’ve demonstrated a certain level of knowledge in a particular area, it might consider that you don’t need to take courses B, C and D. You can go from course A right to course E to accelerate the learning process.”

Training and gamification

If the popularity of sites like Quora, Mumsnet and Money Saving Expert tell us anything, it’s that knowledge sharing is hard-wired into the human psyche. As is a preference to learn through doing, rather than by rote.

When James Hadley, CEO of Immersive Labs, taught students at GCHQ’s Cyber Summer School, he noticed that the courses with the highest success rate were the ethical hacking challenges featuring games. The students were presented with a problem; their task was to solve it, and thus keep the country’s territory, infrastructure and citizens safe. It wasn’t a paper and pencil exercise, but an in-at-the-deep-end simulation.

The challenges were the most successful modules as, according to Immersive Labs’ chief cyber officer, Max Vetter, “the way [we’ve traditionally taught] cyber doesn’t really fit the way people learn cyber”. The challenges, on the other hand, did.

GCHQ requires Cyber Summer School attendees to be natural problem solvers with experience of coding in at least one language. Such requirements attract a particular type of applicant. A lot of attendees already had a lot of experience doing “cyber” in their own time – a very different environment to the lectures and notes-based approach of a traditional classroom-centric course. Yet, as Vetter pointed out, relying on bedroom tinkering alone isn’t appropriate when hiring staff to work on the systems of a multi-billion-pound conglomerate – or the security of a nation.

So Hadley founded Immersive Labs with the aim of developing a more engaging form of training – one that’s better-suited to the course content. Less than two years later, Immersive Labs’ clients include KPMG, BAE Systems, Goldman Sachs and the NHS.

The key to Immersive Labs’ success is in its name. Rather than presenting candidates with a series of written modules, it simulates attacks and other problems, allowing candidates to fix them in a sterile environment.

Organisations subscribe to its platform as they would to virus updates and cloud-based DDoS protection, and it’s open around the clock, every day of the year, giving users the chance to tackle emergent threats within hours. “When WannaCry came along, we got a module on it live within four hours,” Vetter said. “Our users could detonate it in a safe environment and analyse it before it hit their networks. The difference between that and a traditional training course is that the course might take six months to put together, by which point it’s already out of date.”

Almost half of its users log on outside of traditional working hours, which, says Vetter, demonstrates its ability to promote organisational diversity. Women in the workforce are more likely than their male counterparts to be working from home or part-time, in which case the anywhere-anytime aspect of online training is a perfect fit.

The changing face of training

What Immersive Labs and Docebo demonstrate is that, while a traditional LMS still has its place, the most engaging and effective ways to keep a team’s collective skills current are changing.

L&D managers need to look beyond training days and give staff the tools they need to retain and employ what they’ve learned – particularly if, as is increasingly the case, they’re expected to do so in their own time.

That’s unpaid hours for which staff ought to be repaid, at the very least, through engaging, relevant content.

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) has collaborated with the Lancashire Digital Skills Partnership to create a free training programme that will help boost IT employment in the North West of England.

The 16-week training programme, called IT-Ready, focuses on necessary tech and soft skills, as well as communication, conflict management and critical thinking.

The programme was developed in 2012 by CompTIA’s tech workforce charity Creating IT Futures. CompTIA reported that 85% of IT-Ready graduates were employed in a paid IT role with local area companies within four months of taking the programme, typically earning £16,000 - £18,000 per year.

Lancashire Local Digital Skills Partnership regional coordinator Kerry Harrison said the programme would aim to deliver IT training to adults with commitments who might not otherwise have the time to up-skill.

“The proposed flexible delivery model will allow a greater range of people to access the training by fitting around their current employment or caring responsibilities,” she said.

The digital skills shortage in the UK is part of a wider worldwide trend, with as many as 1.8 million IT jobs predicted to be unfilled by 2022.

“The UK tech industry is booming and we now boast more than 165,000 core IT job roles. However, only about one in 10 of these roles are actually getting filled,” said Graham Hunter, CompTIA’s VP of Skills Certification. “With IT-Ready, we are helping more adults get the training they need to boost their career, earn family-sustaining salaries and boost the UK’s digital economy.”

Applicants can enrol via www.creatingitfutures.org/lancashire by 21 February. The IT-Ready hybrid course and the programme is scheduled to start on 7 March.

Over the past several years, technology has become an increasingly important aspect of how we live and work. As such, demand for skilled IT professionals is increasing almost exponentially, but there aren't enough people with the appropriate training to fill those empty roles.

This aspect of the skills gap is well established and has led governments, including our own, to put increased emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) education.

New developments like the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and automation, however, have the potential to further disrupt the sector before most of those currently in education and training even enter the workforce.

With the government predicting 90% of roles will require people with digital skills by 2040, what will the IT workforce of the future really look like?

A changing sector

When thinking about this subject, robots and intelligent machines quickly spring to mind. But experts such as Dave Wells, assistant professor of machine learning and creative research at Leiden University, believe the reality may be far more human.

"The advent of low-code/no-code software, whereby employees (or citizen developers) can drag-and-drop application components, connect them together and create a mobile or web app, will mean staff will be empowered to design and build powerful applications that can scale for any business," he tells IT Pro. "They will be able to do all this without writing a single line of code. The result being that the entire workforce will soon become part of the wider IT team."

He says the advent of these citizen developers will result in dramatic cost savings for businesses, which won't need to employ quite so many expensive developers with the knowledge and expertise of building extensive enterprise programmes.

"By implementing low-code/no-code functionality, organisations are massively broadening the number of people who can assist in digital transformation. In fact, Gartner even stated that citizen development is fundamental to digital transformation," he adds.

This isn't the only sphere in which skilled technologists may find they're the ones being replaced.

"In many cases, thinking machines are replacing human tasks with automation, changing the skills that organisations are looking for in their staff," says John Handelaar, VP EMEA of cyber security firm Gurucul. "History has already proven that AI has drastically changed the face of so many industries for the better. For example, the application of AI in cybersecurity. Using analytics powered by machine learning, we can predict and stop insider threats and fraud before it happens. It means we don't need an army of data scientists looking through thousands of alerts to find the real threats to our businesses."

The new skills gap

According to research from CompTIA, 46% of UK employers believe that the IT skills gap is growing and that emerging technologies are the main reason for this.

Graham Hunter, VP of skills at the organisation, says new technology and a changing digital landscape continue to create difficulties for organisations as they work to fill a variety of job roles that require IT skills. He tells IT Pro: "This will only continue to remain the central issue as workplaces evolve unless businesses are able to adopt new ways of addressing the need for talent."

For the future workforce to thrive, Hunter says, businesses need to re-evaluate approaches to IT recruitment. "With top technology companies dropping their once stringent requirement for candidates to have a degree, alternative, skills based recruitment policies should be championed and encouraged to help address the situation. Rather than looking to find staff with a degree, for example, they should look to alternative education and career pathways like apprenticeships and in particular upskilling existing staff."

Handelaar agrees, although it's not just those already working in the field who he believes need additional training.

"Unfortunately, the majority of the teachers in schools have not had the training or exposure to these disruptive technologies," he says". "We need to encourage retraining for IT workers and assist our teachers in keeping up-to-date with the ever-changing new world."

Sam Samarasekera, business manager at technology recruitment firm Jefferson Frank, says the rapidity of change means there's likely to be a massive shortage of professionals capable of working with AI and machine learning.

"[These technologies are] creating more jobs, which are becoming harder and harder to fill. This skills gap will almost certainly become a crisis if people don't change their approach to finding a new generation of tech talent," Samarasekera says.

"At this stage, it's about encouraging people from a wider range of backgrounds who may have previously been put off. I think the future workforce is going to be visibly more inclusive than it is right now," he continues. "I hope that schools and private companies also try to encourage more IT learning with students, as tech is going to be such a stable career choice that it feels irresponsible not to promote it to young people."

The technology industry is facing a crisis. It's not to do with data privacy, the threat of government sponsored hackers or the rise of sentient AI; it's a crisis of skills.

The need for skilled tech workers is rapidly outstripping the pool of available candidates. According to a recent Gartner report, at least 70% of employees don't possess the digital skills needed to support both their current role and future career progression. This problem could become even more pronounced with the arrival of Brexit, as immigrants with the relevant knowledge and training may find it more difficult to move to the UK. Research from Nesta indicates that Brexit could have a dramatic negative effect on the availability of skilled tech staff for UK businesses.

One of the solutions to this problem is to encourage more young people to explore training and careers in the tech sector, but this may not be an easy prospect. According to a Tech Nation survey from last year, more than 60% of young men and 85% of young women have no interest in pursuing a technology career.

Many young people still feel that specialist qualifications and degrees are the only way to get into technology, and Nesta's research showed that more than half of young people felt that there weren't enough opportunities to access the training necessary for a career in technology. There is also a misconception that technology careers primarily involve sitting in a windowless cubicle, mindlessly punching code into a terminal window. If we want to get young people into tech roles, we need to show them how fun and dynamic they can be, and emphasise the fact that technical knowledge is just one avenue into the industry.

The first step is demonstrating the breadth of different job types that are available. Programmers and coders are far from the only people who make up IT and development teams. Project managers, UX designers and scrum masters are all vital roles within a technology team that involve no coding whatsoever. Instead, these roles rely on skills like organisation, planning and creative design to help accomplish development goals.

The rise of low-code/no code platforms like Appian, Google App Maker and Microsoft PowerApps also means that in some cases, software developers themselves don't even need to learn a programming language. Instead, they can make use of intuitive graphical interfaces, drag-and-drop systems and other tools to create apps without writing a single line of code.

Of course, the value of knowing how to code shouldn't be undersold, and there are many reasons students and young professionals should add programming to their skillsets. Coding roles might have a reputation for being stuffy and boring, but they can be extremely challenging and stimulating. After all, the vast majority of programming revolves around problem-solving; every compiler error is a new puzzle waiting to be tackled.

On top of that, you have the satisfaction of actually building something. Nothing can quite match the feeling of being able to point to a finished product and say 'I made that'. More to the point, tech roles often involve building some of the coolest things, working with innovative cutting-edge technology like containerisation, Big Data and artificial intelligence in order to create groundbreaking products that can revolutionise people's lives.

For proof of how intoxicating the sheer act of coding can be, just look at hackathons; these events are competitions where programmers come together in their free time to test their abilities against one another, racing against the clock to create a functioning product from scratch in as little as a few hours. These competitions are popular over the world, with many attracting thousands of entrants.

One of the companies responsible for hosting events like this is Reply. Reply is a network of interlinked companies that offers consultation, digital services and systems integration to some of the world's biggest companies, specialising in areas such as cloud computing, IoT and Big Data. The companies that make up the group cover a huge range of industries, including logistics, manufacturing, financial services, 3D modelling, digital media and many, many more.

Reply's mission is to foster innovation and to help support and grow the tech ecosystem by encouraging the development of next-generation tech skills. As part of this mission, the organisation hosts a number of challenges, hackathons and events designed to help bring students and young people into the technology industry.

One such event is the recently held Reply Code Challenge, in which competitors solved mathematical logic problems by creating an algorithm from scratch, in any programming language of their choice. Each member of the winning team received a free MacBook Pro, courtesy of Reply.

In addition to the regular Code Challenge, this year Reply is also introducing the Teen Edition Code Challenge -- a special version of the competition aimed at 14 to 19 year olds. The Teen Edition Code Challenge has been developed in partnership with the Italian team for the International Olympiad in Informatics -- a two-day hackathon which is one of the world's most widely-respected computer science competitions.

It's not just coding, however; Reply also organises a similar competition focusing on cyber security, with a further creative competition set to be launched later this year. To find out more about Reply's challenges and to register for the next event, please click here.

The impending skills shortage poses a genuine threat to the future of the UK tech industry, but hackathons and competitions like the Reply Code Challenge could be part of the solution. Events like this provide students and young people with an opportunity to explore the fun and creativity that technology can offer. Not only that, but they're helping to open the next generation's eyes to the possibilities offered by a career in technology, and helping them build the skills and contacts required to pursue one.

A third of IT workers will seek out new job opportunities in 2018, on the hunt for a better salary, to better their skills or to work with a business where IT is a priority, according to Spiceworks.

The company's 2018 IT Career Outlook also revealed that 7% of IT workers are planning to become a consultant in 2018, leaving their fully employed job roles in exchange for more flexible working, while 5% want to leave the IT industry completely, in search of a career change.

Millennials are the most enthusiastic for change, with 36% of the age group either planning to change employer in search of a better salary or to work for a more talented team, compared to 23% of baby boomers that want to leave their current position due to burnout.

"Although the majority of IT professionals are satisfied with their jobs, many also believe they should be making more money, and will take the initiative to find an employer who is willing to pay them what they're worth in 2018," said Peter Tsai, senior technology analyst at Spiceworks.

"Many IT professionals are also motivated to change jobs to advance their skills, particularly in cybersecurity. As data breaches and ransomware outbreaks continue to haunt businesses, IT professionals recognize there is high demand for skilled security professionals now, and in the years to come."

Other findings in the report showed the most in-demand skills are those related to cybersecurity, with 81% of IT professionals saying experience in the area will be critical in 2018. However, only 19% of those questioned said they have cybersecurity skills.

Other skills that will be vital for IT workers going into 2018 are networking, infrastructure hardware, end-user devices, and storage and backup. A higher proportion of those working in the industry said they have these skills compared to cybersecurity.

Technology has had a transformational effect on the way we work today and new innovations promise an even brighter future. But there's a dark cloud on the horizon. A serious digital skills gap is emerging, prompting fears that a lack of relevant talent could stymie UK economic growth in the future.

According to research from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, backed by Tata, British educational institutions are failing equip their students with the skills they will need to become productive members of the future workplace. It found that 63% of engineers believe the skills shortage will worsen over the coming years and that 1.8 million engineers will be needed by 2025.

Of course, the skills shortage isn't just affecting engineering it's a similar picture across the whole technology industry. According to a study conducted by the British Chambers of Commerce, this growing epidemic is affecting productivity within companies, with three in four firms profiled saying they're struggling with digital skills shortages. There are also those in the industry who believe the UK's exit from the European Union will add further fuel to the fire.

While there's certainly a lot to worry about, change is beginning to happen. There's a plethora of companies, educational institutions and governments that have recognised the issue and are developing talent pools to close the skills gap.

The gender imbalance

One of the big talent challenges in the technology industry is the gender imbalance. It's generally felt that there aren't enough women working in the sector and that sexism is still commonplace. The Tech Talent Charter, founded by a number of organisations across the recruitment, tech and social enterprise fields, is an organisation looking to fix this growing problem.

Promoted in the government's policy paper on the UK Digital Strategy in March 2017, the organisation aims to support the retention of female tech talent and encourage candidates to highly skilled technology roles in a bid to ensure there are equal opportunities within the industry. Since launching two years ago, more than 47 companies have signed the charter, including the likes of Monster and Global Radio.

Debbie Forster, CEO of Tech Talent Charter, says it's crucial companies ensure both sexes are given the same opportunities. "Both retention of tech talent and encouragement of candidates to roles are essential in order to deliver the skills required to fuel the economy. Research by Tech City UK highlighted a requirement for 1 million tech workers by 2020 and female workers have a vital role to play in ensuring the UK continues to have a strong role in technological and digital innovation," she tells IT Pro.

"Alarmingly the representation of females in these all important roles is disproportionately low only 17% of tech and telco workers are currently women.These stats highlight it's vital for the industry to come together, both to support females within in the industry and to demonstrate to future generations that a career in technology is incredibly rewarding.

"This is exactly why the Tech Talent Charter was created. It's a commitment by organisations to a set of undertakings that aim to deliver greater diversity in the tech workforce of the UK."

Upskilling all staff

Martin Ewings, director of specialist markets at recruitment and talent firm Experis, believes that companies need to give all members of their workforce opportunities to learn new skills, including older employees who possess lots of experience and knowledge.

"Britain is currently facing its biggest tech skills deficit to date and demand for digitally skilled professionals continues to grow. However, the industry can't wait for Generation Z to bring new skills into the market to close the gap," Ewings says .

"Many employers fail to recognise that they already have access to a previously untapped talent pool within their current workforce the older generation. Armed with legacy knowledge, industry experience and the aptitude to learn new skills that can help them develop in the digital age, the older workforce provides a 'hidden talent pool' in the labour market that employers need to be tapping into.

"For organisations that want to upskill their older workers, there are three points to consider: Firstly, nurture individuals with the aptitude and enthusiasm to learn new skills. Secondly, encourage staff to get involved with different projects and assignments around the business to widen their understanding, and provide continuous opportunities to upskill. And finally, recognise there's no silver bullet for training whether it's traditional classroom training or an online course, craft training strategies that align with each individual's requirements."

Accelerating training

Across the UK, there are various areas that suffer more with a lack of tech talent than others, of which Wales is one.

DevOpsGuys, however, is looking to fix this.

At the end of October, the Cardiff-based company launched its own academy to nurture and develop skilled technology professionals in the country. Working with Welsh University, Cardiff Met and the Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, the firm offers courses accredited by the British Computing Society. They combine a standard qualification with hands on practical training.

Ryan Cullen, people partner at DevOpsGuys, says: "To say the tech sector is facing a skills shortage is an understatement, the question is what business can do about it. The gap is widening and the only way to narrow it is to start developing the next generation of tech talent now, not later. This is what the DevOpsGuys Academy seeks to achieve.

"The scheme takes a three-fold approach. First, the Academy attracts an annual intake of interns, graduates and apprentices where students get real-world practical experience that provides the perfect mix between degree and apprenticeship.

"Second, by engaging secondary school children, we aim to excite young people about the possibilities of a career in tech. This involves supporting the educational choices that will enable them to start their career. Third, we deliver public facing training courses that focus on those areas where there is a limited talent pool; thereby, equipping workers with the intellectual toolkit to bridge this skills-gap."

There's no getting away from the fact there's a chronic skills gap in the technology industry, and it's worsened greatly over the last few years. However, we're beginning to see companies notice and address this problem internally as well as externally. It's almost impossible to predict the future, but this important work will likely continue and advance in the foreseeable future.

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