With the pandemic-driven trend of remote working and millions of people moving to virtual workspaces, digital solutions and skills have become an inseparable part of our daily routines. Increasingly, candidates working across a range of sectors – from finance to sales, and arts to public service – will have a grounding knowledge and understanding of IT services.
Deeper tech skills, however, are seemingly in short supply. With more than 100,000 job openings in the UK IT industry every week and a rising demand for specialists, the sector must find another way to plug the tech skills gap, or face a talent shortage of 85.2 million people by 2030.
The growth and acceptance of remote working has removed geographical barriers in IT recruitment – and the same breadth of thinking must now be applied to candidates who have little or no experience in the sector.
Career transitions with transferable skills
In today’s IT job market, transferable and core (or soft) skills are becoming increasingly more important – and in many instances, matter more than traditional ‘hard’ or technical skills. Gone are the days when an engineer was seen as a siloed ‘prodigy’, working to build software alone. Today, creating digital solutions requires teamwork, and well organised processes – skills that are most definitely not in short supply across the board.
For solution architects at Ciklum, for example, 90% of their time is spent on communication, and only 10% on actually writing code. Advanced communication and organisational skills are a must for a career in tech.
So too, are those soft skills in time and priority management, teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking and the ability to take initiative. For those businesses with a hybrid working model and distributed teams working from a variety of locations, these abilities become even more essential. The engineers and technical architects of today must think not only in terms of code – but business, markets and industries.
Retention, innovation, diversification
There are significant business benefits to hiring candidates from outside of the tech industry. Newcomers can help to boost innovation, bringing original and fresh ideas about the company’s processes, products or services. A candidate from outside of the sector will typically not suffer from ‘industry fatigue’, either.
External candidates can also be moulded to suit the business and taught methods of doing things that align with business strategy. Identifying individuals with those all-important core skills, and then training them in technical knowledge (according to the needs of the business) is a great way to foster company loyalty and drive employee retention.
Tech companies today create comprehensive solutions for various verticals – such as finance, retail, or healthcare – and so it is crucial for team members to be familiar with the peculiarities of a whole range of industries. Whilst a new employee can learn the language of programming and coding relatively fast, industry expertise is not as easy to reach. New hires with experience in these verticals can bring additional, and sometimes decisive, value to a project. The business demand for employees with verticals expertise is only set to grow.
What can HR teams do to support candidates from outside of the industry?
The professional landscape is changing – the World Economic Forum’s 2020 future of jobs report noted that businesses expect 40% of their employees to require re-skilling in the next six months or less. Employers should be open to the potential of outside candidates – given that existing employees will also need significant investment in training in order to keep up with a quickly evolving industry.
Offer personalised development strategies
It’s important for HR to have strong re-skilling programmes, learning opportunities based on real-world cases, and solid infrastructure for the overall training process.
Ciklum’s learning and development department has several options for employees – starting with a comprehensive onboarding course, up to a range of additional educational opportunities both in-house via our academies and with external providers. Ciklum’s L&D specialists work together with HR to help design personal development plans and address the specific learning requirements.
Foster a culture of knowledge sharing
Knowledge hubs and mentoring programmes have an important role to play in bringing external candidates up to speed. At Ciklum, we pair seasoned and qualified engineers with younger, or newer colleagues. For HR teams, the task is to help organise these collaborations and assist in tracking their progress.
Job description audit
Bringing external, non technically skilled candidates into an IT enterprise also requires a full review of job descriptions, in order to encourage people with the necessary core and soft skills to actually make their application. HR teams must ensure that any future JDs include (and place importance upon) communication, team working and problem solving skills alongside any other requirements.
Tackle industry stereotypes
It is true that the enormous potential of the tech sector often makes it an attractive prospect for professionals outside of the industry – however, harmful stereotypes and myths about tech might be putting up barriers for some. It’s important for HR teams in the industry to tackle misconceptions – simple actions such as showcasing the careers and work of staff members who do not fit the ‘expected’ profile in tech of white and male, or demonstrating the fact that you don’t need to be a ‘coder’ to work in tech.
By opening the door to candidates without traditional technical training, tech businesses can provide opportunities for a wider range of people regardless of their background, gender, age or ethnicity. Widening the talent pool is an essential task of any business today – and tech talent can be cultivated in-house as much as it can be sourced. It is simply a matter of survival; businesses should look towards the future, and to shaping and recruiting a new generation of technology professionals.
