Hiring for technology jobs stalled during 2021 due to lack of specialized talent in new digital tools. In other words, a lot of employment was reported, but few profiles with the necessary skills to occupy them.
According to an analysis by the Get on Board platform, less than 50% of applications to digital positions had a successful hiring last year. “There were very few qualified candidates for the positions,” the report highlights.
“There is a huge amount of demand that has grown and has grown much faster than the supply of talent. Today there are many more technology companies and companies that are not technology, but are looking for talent for technology”, says Sergio Nouvel, co-founder and CEO of Get on Board.
Part of this gap between supply and demand is due to the little talent available for senior positions related to information technologies (ICTs), roles for which there is greater competition among companies to keep the best profiles.
To a large extent, the growth in demand for digital profiles it is related to the effects of the pandemic on the digitization and automation of businesses; for example, e-commerce.
“It has to do with an issue of formation of profiles. Today, digital tools have evolved as development issues, digital transformation or data. With the development of technology, which is evolving exponentially, people are not managing to adapt or learn from these new tools”, explains Luciano González, founding member of Trece Capital Humano.
The National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi) estimates that in Mexico there are 976,000 people trained in information technologies, 43% of them have a career related to Computer Science and the rest with Information and Communication Technologies.
“There is a combination of variants. In our case, between 2020 and 2021 the profiles demand. The rate of growth in the demand for these profiles is high. But the demand grows faster than the number of graduates, to which we must add that not all graduates have good foundations. Not all those who study for a university degree have those skills that companies are asking for”, explains Emmanuel Olvera, CEO of IT Jobs.
In this sense, the specialist assures that currently companies are no longer looking for talent that specializes in a single programming language, but they seek to dominate up to three different technologies to adapt to the transformations in the market. The problem is that some of these skills are new and are not being developed in the classroom.
The World Economic Forum estimates that as a result of the digitalization and automation of business, half of the world’s workforce will have to be retrained to develop new skills. It can take two to three months for a person to be trained in data analysis, artificial intelligence or business development; the process for cloud computing and engineering skills can take four to five months.
“We are seeing that DevOps, quality control, mobile development and data science are jobs where success rate is low and clearly that indicates that there is an opportunity there for people who want to study or start learning these disciplines”, says Sergio Nouvel.
Get on Board report indicates that Full-Stack positions had the highest hire rate in 2021 among all roles in technology, but barely reached 48 percent. In DevOps only 28% of the candidates were hired, in quality control only 29% and for data science only 37% of the positions offered were filled.
Conditions are attractive
The pressure in the market to access little specialized talent It generates that these profiles have better working conditions than the average of the workers, from salaries to benefits higher than those of the law.
Luciano González explains that the competition for technology professionals It is not only at the national level, but also internationally, since it is increasingly common for companies from the United States or India to hire Mexicans for remote positions. This phenomenon causes job offers to be accompanied by a robust compensation package that is becoming increasingly stronger in the face of difficulties in finding the right candidates.
“More and more are being developed. technology platforms and business methods and they are the ones that end up winning that talent, you no longer only compete with the local market”, he affirms.
According to the Get on Board analysis, among highly valued benefits for digital talent are insurance for major medical expenses, remote work and vacations above the legal minimum.
“In extreme competition, the companies that offer the best conditions have the upper hand, because talent can choose, that is extremely important. There are many companies that think that technical profiles it is something that can be obtained later or at a low cost, but the truth is that these workers have options and are choosing jobs that pay them better, but also offer them better conditions”, points out Sergio Nouvel.
From problem to solution
For Emmanuel Olvera, part of the solution to end the shortage of specialized profiles lies in the teaching of digital skills from high school.
But that is not the only way, it is also important that the workers themselves bet on their own training. “There are several alternatives to make career changes and this goes hand in hand with the fact that some companies do not require university studies to access work. I have seen people who study a specialty in six months and become specialists in Front-end or data”, says the specialist.
For his part, Sergio Nouvel considers that one of the challenges to having more specialized talent is that organizations hire more people for jobs junior and develop them to fill the positions senior, where it is usually more difficult to find suitable candidates. “The vast majority of companies aspire to work with highly qualified people. senior and that puts the market in a state of stagnation”, he exposes.
In this sense, Luciano González believes that this scenario represents an opportunity for new talents, who can take advantage of free training platforms to create a career plan and specialize.
“It is a matter of Constant Learning. Today companies are more open to hiring people who do not necessarily meet the full profile, but who can develop internally”, he stresses.
