Mind the Gap: How to Navigate the Cloud Skills Shortage

You’re months behind schedule. This “lift & shift” project should have been much easier, but you keep running into roadblocks that require insight beyond your IT team’s current capabilities. They're used to running your legacy ERP platform, but these new cloud-based requirements – it's just not making any sense.

What’s more, bringing on new staff with the right skills has slowed you down. You’ve had three offer letters rejected in as many weeks because candidates are getting snatched up by companies outside your industry who have bigger headcount budgets.

You and your CTO know that cloud is the future and required to stay competitive. But right now, that future seems out of reach and other leaders in your business are losing confidence in you. So what can you do?

The Cloud Skills Gap is Real

It’s not an illusion. There’s definitely a cloud skills gap.

Among 850 IT decision makers surveyed by market research firm Foundry (formerly IDG Communications, Inc.), the top cloud-related concerns were controlling costs, the lack of security skills, and data privacy and security vulnerabilities. And while 34 percent of respondents were specifically concerned with the security skills gap, that’s only one point more than the 33 percent who were equally worried about a lack of general cloud management expertise available within the market.

This gap proves even more concerning when considering roughly 80 percent of survey respondents had increased their cloud management team headcount by an average 3.3 workers over the previous year. Meanwhile, 96 percent had already faced "significant challenges to implementing their cloud strategy."

It’s abundantly clear that there are just not enough skilled employees available in the market. And the problem only seems to be getting worse.

Risks of an Underskilled Workforce

Businesses still need to operate despite the shortage of talented candidates, which leads many to cut corners.

All too frequently, existing cloud management teams are forced to shoulder the burden of this ever-increasing workload, putting in longer hours and overseeing a broader set of responsibilities. As a result, they spend less time on critical infrastructure, innovation, and development roadmaps.

And when cloud transformation efforts are insufficiently planned, all manner of problems can develop, such as vendor lock-in or overly-complex architectures that hinder and even limit the addition of new functionality.

Not to mention, an overworked team is more prone to churn, further exacerbating the problem of hiring and retaining a team with the cloud skills needed to deploy and manager cloud projects successfully.