The IT skills gap continues to be a source of pain for MSPs across the globe as they struggle to fill vacancies for technical engineers due to candidates lacking skills or employers not having access to the appropriate talent.

So, what are the challenges for the IT industry in 2023? The IT Leaders: The Future Outlook Report 2023 by Rimini Street details challenges faced by leaders in the IT industry, outlines creative solutions and looks ahead to the future. Below are some of our key takeaways from the report:

The Cost-of-Living Crisis and Unrealistic Salary Expectations

One of the biggest challenges of 2022, according to tech leaders, is the unrealistic salary expectations due to the rising costs of living. The soaring wage demands are making it difficult for companies to attract the best talent as well as retain their current employees. This effects the company internally with additional pressure placed on current employees due to the inability to recruit or retain skilled staff.

Productivity Decrease

The current stress caused by the talent shortage is that teams are constantly fighting a losing battle putting out fires, which reduces productivity. This knocks on to another challenge with 42% of the industry concerned about losing their key staff because of burnout. Businesses are unable to address skill gaps within their team due to the shortage of talent. This then damages the productivity of their current staff, and this can mean they are trying to tackle issues that they’re not trained to fix.

4 Day Working Week

40% of IT bosses are seeing recruits’ clamour for a 4-day working week policy, which companies feel they are unable to provide. Businesses have been trialling the 4 day working week across the globe with 95% of organisations in the UK trial saying productivity has remained the same or improved. However, with the 24-7-365 nature of the IT industry and many companies having customers across the globe, it’s no wonder they are having difficulties implementing this. With organisations losing out on talent to competitors who are putting a shorter week in place.

What solutions are IT business leaders looking at to fix their skills gap in 2023? 

Industry bosses are implementing creative solutions to their current talent gaps which includes:

• 60% are hiring talent with a desire to learn and build upon their current skillset that are less experienced.
• 50% are looking to employ from different locations who can work remotely and functionally as part of a virtual team.
• 39% of businesses are cross-skilling their staff to assist across departments.

It’s also important for businesses to consider ways that they can retain their current talent and avoid losing them to competition. Ensuring that employees are engaged and happy with their working environment will help to keep the impact of the skills gap on your business to a minimum.

How can we help?

Do these issues sound familiar to you? We speak to customers everyday who are spending time and money to employ skilled engineers only to lose out to competitors. Explore Inbay’s Remote Dedicated Tech solution and let us take on the burden of recruitment giving you access to our talent pool of highly skilled technical engineers.