IT Talent Shortage Hobbles Emerging Tech Adoption

The lack of skilled IT workers is hurting the deployment of emerging technology, according to a new survey from Gartner. In areas from cloud to cybersecurity, this crisis is expected to last for years to come.

The pandemic accelerated the digital transformation plans of companies as they sought new ways to connect with their customers and to enable their employees to work remotely. For many companies, however, even though the digital transformation timeline has moved faster than expected, it’s still not gone as fast as they would like.

A new report from Gartner has revealed one of the reasons for the delay. The survey shows that IT executives have identified the talent shortage as the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies, compared to just 4% in 2020. What’s more, the lack of talent availability was cited more than any other barrier in the survey, including implementation cost at 29% and security risk at 7%.

“The ongoing push toward remote work and the acceleration of hiring plans in 2021 has exacerbated IT talent scarcity, especially for sourcing skills that enable cloud and edge, automation, and continuous delivery,” said Yinuo Geng, research VP at Gartner, in a statement. “As one example, of all the IT automation technologies profiled in the survey, only 20% of them have moved ahead in the adoption cycle since 2020. The issue of talent is to blame here.”

The survey found that talent availability was the leading inhibiting adoption factor among all six tech domains -- compute infrastructure and platform services, network, security, digital workplace, IT automation, and storage and database.

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