When Tech Skills Requirements Move too fast

The biggest challenge companies face is keeping their workers up to date with skills as technologies evolve so that they can continue efficiently providing services to their customers. In last couple of decades, technology has evolved at a rapid speed. Not only companies, but also the workers are finding it difficult to keep pace. Taking a proactive stance is the best solution.

To give you an idea about how quickly technology is evolving, let’s have a quick look at the evolution of Java. With every version release, new features get added, and sometimes the functionality and syntax also change.

Hence, even an expert in Java SE 8 might confront challenges when first using Java SE 9.

Proficiency in technology use that is considered a niche skill today may become an obsolete skill in the next few years, if not months. To add to these challenges, we are now using technologies through the Cloud, which is a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage and process data.

Nearly every organization has or is planning to migrate to the Cloud. Big players in the market, such as Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon, are providing these Cloud services, and they are constantly trying to find skilled workers who can adapt to the changes precipitated by Cloud migration. To meet the challenges, employees and the employers can take some proactive measures.

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The steps an employee should take to make sure they are prepared to adapt to any new technologies that might come their way, include the following:

Up-skilling: Employees must put in efforts now to ensure that they will continue to meet the current market requirements with respect to new technologies. It is crucial for employees to maintain the upper-hand over technology, and ensure job security, by avoiding performance issues that might cause their employers fire them. It is more important than ever for employees to keep up the pace with the technology to avoid being left behind in the race to the future.

Re-skilling: Many companies, especially those whose industries have changed dramatically, have begun focusing on re-skilling their employees. This helps companies ensure that their workers will stay employable in a competitive and changing marketplace, and, in turn, these companies can take advantage of their employees’ newly learned skills to provide better services to their customers. For example, workers who are skilled in Java programming could be trained to program in AngularJS. This will not only help these employees learn and master a new technology, it will also benefit the company, which now has the ability to assign these workers any new project requested in AngularJS. This is especially important during times when the company might not have requests for Java-based projects. Hence, it is a win-win situation for both the employees and the employer.

The steps an employer should take to mitigate the constant demands on their employees, include the following:

1. Train more employees to become subject matter experts (SMEs).

   For any technology, the business as usual” activities can be performed by less skilled workers, but when teams hit a technical roadblock, they need an SME, who has mastered particular technologies, available to help them overcome any roadblock they face. These SMEs should be considered an investment for the company and not an overhead cost.

2. Plan Training. 

Another option companies have is to train its workers. Companies invest a huge portion of their budget for corporate trainings to enable current employees to learn the latest technologies and help new employees, straight-from-college, reach a certain productivity level, so that they can all effectively support customers. This is a critical part of any company’s strategy, as organizational goals can only be achieved by having a highly skilled and efficient workforce.

For any company to achieve its goals, arranging effective corporate training programs is a critical task. In fact, almost all organizations now have a dedicated Learning and Development (L&D) department that focuses on the educational needs of the company’s employees and accordingly identifies the right training partner to help them achieve those goals. Identifying the right training partner can seem daunting, but it needn’t be.

At eSkill, skills assessments that support your training needs in a wide range of fields, to help get your staff keep at the highest knowledge levels. Our standard and custom assessments support training across a wide set of skill areas, and with options that provide for multiple versions of a test, multimedia support, and extensive reporting.

Author Bio

Payel is an analyst at SpringPeople & writes on emerging technology trends for IT professionals. Passionate about technology, her current area of focus is the digital revolution underway in the edu-tech industry. When not at work, Payel splits her time between writing, reading and watching sci-fi movies.