The cloud provides significant advantages for businesses that make use of it. But, as its importance and usage are growing, it is creating a new set of challenges for companies. One of the biggest challenges is the skill development of the workforce.
Based on the figures from Gartner, Inc., most of the organizations will rely on public cloud in the coming years – the worldwide public cloud services market is expected to reach $331.2 billion in 2022, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.6%.
With the cloud market set to grow stronger than ever before, it has become pertinent for CIOs to reskill their workforce with the appropriate business and technical skills to address challenges. If they don’t plan it well, the skills’ gap will have a long-term impact on their business.
The UK has already been facing a huge economic loss in productivity due to lack of investment in digital-oriented training in the workplace. According to the reports, the lack in digital skills costs £10 billion to the UK, in terms of lost productivity.
The scale of the problem varies from country to country, but the issue remains the same.
Also Read: Top challenges for CIOs in a software-driven, hybrid, multi-cloud world: Survey
Why is reskilling essential in the cloud age?
The problem is that the IT processes that are needed to be automated are already changing rapidly as the organizations are moving beyond deploying uniform applications on virtual machines in the cloud.
The way we manage cloud infrastructure is transforming too. Now, there are microservices that require the companies to deploy, manage, and secure their applications, and these microservices are many from hundreds to even thousands.
With this fundamental shift in the IT approach in software development, cloud-based computing is no more just about managing a fixed number of virtual machines. So, businesses that want to successfully implement the cloud computing strategies need to significantly reskill their IT workforce to expand their skillsets.
The IT staff needs to have strong technical skills – the ability to think creative through business cases and aptitude to learn new skills, tools and technologies. They also need to know in-depth about software process, operations, and cloud infrastructure, to be able to implement the cloud solutions successfully.
How to address the cloud skills’ gap?
The main challenge for companies that are moving to the cloud is that cloud roles are continuously changing. For example, yesterday’s business analyst is now a cloud business analyst, or yesterday’s network engineer is now a cloud network engineer. So, new roles are required to encompass the new tasks coming up due to the changing company operations, as a result of the cloud shift.
Companies need skilled cloud professionals. They need individuals who have the ability to design cloud solution architecture, manage access to data and resources, analyze and improve IT and business processes, manage planned implementation, and ensure continuous operations and service reliability.
Agile development in an organization is significant. To meet the desired skillsets, companies need to master various flavors of the cloud through continued IT education and investment. They need to provide Agile Training to reskill their workforce and enable them to be as effective as possible.
The primary focus of Agile Training is to advance the various scrum meetings and improve communication and manage the expectations for the team. It helps your team to understand the design of the scrum process and how to enable your team members to do more.
Other than this, it is important to constantly expose your team to good practices to teach them the critical skills. Also, involving them with people, for example, pair programming (a technique where a non-skilled team is paired with a skilled team to promote learning) help them deal with cultural changes as well.
Also Read: 10 technologies CXOs must incorporate in their roadmaps in 2020
The action – get started now!
When it comes to staying ahead in the digital transformation journey, cloud skills are the most important investment you can make. But, like any other cloud initiative, making sure that your employees understand the business, culture and structure is an important step before you start the reskilling process.
In this transformed world, cloud skills are unarguably the most important skills. And, with that in mind, developing the right cloud skills becomes very important for organizations today to keep up with the innovations required to stay on the top.
Once the skills are developed, the companies can evaluate their talented workforce and assess and update their cloud skills regularly so that they can meet the desired cloud set of skills.
What’s more? These cloud training programs will make the employees with greater set of skills feel great about their expertise and maybe later, these skills will get invested in the success of the other people they train.
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I agree. It is time to reskill employees now to get them ready for the cloud age.
By the way, any training recommendations that me and my team can take?