AI Skills and Talent Gaps Widen as Innovation Accelerates

New Skillsoft Report - Seite 2

This presents a missed opportunity for strengthening business outcomes and talent retention. IT professionals who receive training report improved work quality (62%), a greater sense of engagement (47%), and faster job performance (45%). Meanwhile, 82% of IT professionals say training is extremely or very important to their career and a lack of development was the top factor that drove respondents to change employers in the last year.

Taking a “whole-person” approach to development.
“Hard” or technical skills have traditionally been prioritized in the IT industry, while “soft” or power skills can fall by the wayside despite being essential for adapting and augmenting transformative technologies, especially GenAI. IT professionals rank team communication (40%), interpersonal communication (21%), and emotional intelligence (13%) as the three most important skills for IT leaders to have. However, just 6% of IT leaders said leadership skills will be a key area of investment moving forward, and only 7% said the same about power skills.

With 72% of IT leaders ranking their existing teams’ leadership skills as medium to low, there is a significant gap between training needs and priorities in this critical area. This presents a major opportunity for businesses to build well-rounded IT professionals by providing leadership training as a differentiator to drive greater innovation, growth, and efficiencies.

Building next-generation skilling programs.
Skills gaps, talent shortages, and technology transformation are challenges impacting IT departments. However, they are all obstacles that can be remediated with a well-orchestrated training program that blends multiple modalities and content types. According to IT professionals, the most important features of a training program include quality of content (55%), opportunities for hands-on practice (50%), and multiple learning methods (38%). Online, on-demand training is the most popular learning modality among IT professionals this year (59%), followed by online live training (46%) and impromptu training at work (31%). Additionally, IT professionals leverage a variety of learning resources ranging from employer training subscriptions (35%) and certification prep guides (25%) to online communities (24%).