Courtesy of S. Baker
As many as eight in ten organisations say their business operations are being impacted by skill gaps among their IT staff according to CompTIA’s State of the IT Skills Gap study.
The study involved over 500 US IT and business managers overseeing IT staff within their organisations.
The lack of training and quick changing technology were reported to be the biggest factors in fuelling the skills gap. Nearly six in ten organisations (57 percent) are tackling their IT skills gap challenges by training or retraining their staff in areas where skills need improvement.
"Millions of businesses are clearly not where they want to be when it comes to optimizing their utilization of technology and in the skill levels of their IT staffs," said Terry Erdle, Executive Vice President of CompTIA. "Even modest improvements in these two areas would yield tremendous benefits in operational efficiencies, business productivity and economic growth."
Companies reported their IT staff are lacking skills in areas such as security, improving network infrastructure, virtualisation, mobility, business process automation, data storage, disaster recovery and refreshing aging equipment.
The lack of certain skills among IT staff also has a significant impact on business productivity.
The CompTIA study reveals that over 40% of companies reported that staff productivity was directly impacted by the lack of knowledge among IT staff. Over 30% of companies said their customer service and security were affected. 23% of small firms reported that profitability was also affected compared to just 15% of large and medium firms.
Efforts put into educating and training current IT staff can help fill gaps that could hamper business productivity and success.
"The expected commitment to more education is an encouraging sign," said Erdle. "IT professionals have a strong propensity for lifelong learning and skills enhancement, so the large majority will welcome the opportunity to broaden their knowledge. An investment in new IT education and training will deliver strong return on investment to the business’s bottom line."
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