We know that finding mid-level Microsoft Azure, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Security professionals is harder than it’s ever been. This insightful article will help you solve your Microsoft Cloud workforce growth challenges by contrasting two popular methods for finding talent: career schemes and reskilling.
As you’re probably already aware, businesses that are looking to modernize legacy processes by implementing tools like Microsoft Azure or Dynamics 365 are finding it much easier to find the right cloud products than access the talent they need to implement these.
A lack of digital skills makes it impossible for businesses just like yours to generate ROI from your cloud products. What’s more, it can also create an even larger financial sinkhole due to staff training and turnover costs. Recent research by Skillsoft found that 66% of IT decision-makers were facing a critical talent shortage in their team in 2022. While this is a welcome 10% drop compared to 2021, one in three IT leaders still reported having 3+ open roles on their teams.
Furthermore, Gartner reported that tech executives see the lack of skills as their biggest barrier to adopting 64% of emerging technologies (a sharp rise from just 4% in 2021).
Given the startling stats, it’s clear that fighting over candidates from the tech sector’s already limited talent pool is not a sustainable, long-term solution to tackling the skills shortage. As the industry seeks to solve its greatest challenge, it’s important to look beyond traditional hiring strategies and invest in developing (rather than obtaining) cloud talent.
And there are a range of approaches organizations can take when developing their in-house talent pipeline. Among these, early career schemes and reskilling are two of the most common and effective strategies to building long-term internal cloud capabilities. But which approach is right for your business?
Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of these two training models across five key areas to help you decide.
Early career schemes
Early career schemes take talent that’s new to the job market, in the early stages of their careers, and help them develop a range of additional skills while they’re on the job. The most popular early career schemes tend to be graduate programs that place freshly graduated students into entry-level roles, offering them support and training along the way. Most graduate schemes tend to last around two years. However, graduates are often offered permanent roles with the company, once the scheme is complete.
1. Industry experience
As early career schemes engage graduates, they offer the benefit of bringing new talent with fresh perspectives into your organization. Hiring candidates without much experience in the world of work can be a good advantage, allowing you to start with a clean slate and ‘mould’ graduates into the type of professionals they need, instilling the skills you most require. The flip side, of course, is that sometimes you might need candidates with specialist, industry-specific experience, especially in areas like Microsoft Cloud, where there’s a lot of variation between different verticals when it comes to requirements and platform usage.
2. Salary levels
Graduate schemes tend to pay salaries of around $50,000 per year in the United States. In the UK, the average is around £33,000. Though grad schemes relating to tech roles often pay higher than average rates, the cost of hiring a budding tech professional through a graduate scheme will be considerably less than hiring a candidate with more experience, if you compare that to $126,500, the average salary for a Microsoft Developer in the US or £40-50k in the UK.
3. Retention rates
Investing in the future of your graduate hires and giving them a pathway to develop their careers can really pay off; but only if your grads decide to stay on. Graduate schemes tend to have a high attrition rate—research suggests that more than half of students expect to leave their first jobs within two years.
4. Soft skills
Graduates come equipped with plenty of soft skills gleaned from years of studying at college level. Former students boast transferable abilities like collaboration, willingness to learn, critical thinking, prioritization, and time management as highly useful in the workplace. There are, however, some soft skills that are difficult to develop outside of the workplace, and only really come with time and experience like consulting acumen, project methodology, and stakeholder management. If you value these above other soft skills, you may struggle to find these in a graduate and may benefit from hiring more experienced professionals.
5. Time and cost of training
Of course, it’s not just salary that you have to factor in when costing up the ROI of a graduate scheme. To get maximum value from hiring graduates, you need to put in the time and money to get them up to speed.
Creating robust training programs that instil real-life skills is not easy, and there’s a danger of reducing training programs to a tick-box exercise. Unfortunately, the reality is that not every business is equipped to provide the development infrastructure that’s needed to build a viable, long-term pipeline of talent via graduate schemes.
That’s certainly part of the reason the tech skills gap has grown so cavernous. Tech moves fast, and organizations don’t always have the luxury of time and resources to help graduates develop the skills they need, leaving such businesses with little choice but to enter the battle for external talent.
Looking to access experienced mid-level Microsoft Azure, Power Platform, or Dynamics 365 talent?
Reskilling programs
Reskilling is another viable option for nurturing talent. Building on the potential and enthusiasm of your existing workforce, reskilling can help you take experienced employees with valuable business knowledge and imbue them with cutting-edge Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 skills. It’s a win-win for both parties. With in-house reskilling, you get access to the skills you need to drive the business forward in a less disruptive way. And your employee, in return, gets to develop their career with the potential of earning a better salary, making them more likely to stick around, reducing attrition rates in your organization.
1. Industry experience
One of the great benefits of developing existing staff is that they already know your business and your industry inside-out. That kind of understanding and proprietary know-how is valuable, and makes building skills that align directly with your organization’s requirements and goals that much easier.
2. Soft skills
Having already been on the job for some time, your employees will likely have a lot of the soft skills that your business, and your future roles, require. However, they’re still likely to need to be trained up in new soft skills that are more specific to cloud-related jobs, and these can be trickier to teach than hard technical skills.
Unless you’ve been an ardent champion of lifelong learning throughout your company’s existence, some professionals may not have the same openness to change and familiarity with learning that a recent graduate might.
Let’s face it; learning new things can be tough, and for a lot of people in the workforce, it’ll have been a while since they were faced with the kind of learning, studying, and exams that are prevalent in the tech space. So you may need to do a bit more convincing to get them on-board.
3. Salary levels
It goes without saying that if you’re upskilling an employee to take on a more complex and demanding job role, you need to pay them accordingly. However, a newly-certified Microsoft professional that’s still cutting their teeth won’t expect the same kind of salary as someone who’s been in the market for a few years. This means that you could save a lot of cash on salaries if you look for talent internally rather than externally.
4. Time and cost of training
Investing in reskilling your employees from a non-cloud tech stack into an in-demand specialism like Microsoft Azure, Power Platform, or Dynamics 365, as well as upskilling them to attain more advanced Microsoft Cloud capabilities and certifications can be costly. Both in terms of the certification and course cost, as well as the pressure this adds to other team members who may need to pick up the slack. But Revolent can help you transform your employees into delivery-ready Microsoft Cloud specialists with minimal impact on productivity. Find out more about Revolent ReSkill for Microsoft by visiting this page.
5. Retention rates
For many tech professionals, better pay is only one reason for leaving a role. Often, professional stagnation is what really drives them out. According to a recent survey of Microsoft Azure professionals, the second most important reason for wanting to change jobs was a lack of career and promotional aspects, with 38% of respondents citing this as a primary motivation.
Investing in your staff promotes loyalty. Employees are less likely to feel undervalued or underutilized in a job where they’re being trained to do exciting new things, and this can result in increased dedication to your business and longer tenures for your team members.
Looking to upskill your existing employees into fully-certified Microsoft Cloud professionals?
What's the ideal solution?
Both graduate schemes and reskilling schemes have their place in our effort to close the tech skills gap. However, organizations often struggle to find the time and resources necessary to invest in these programs, in light of pressing projects or deadlines. If you’re looking to bring highly sought-after Microsoft Cloud skills and/or fresh perspectives on board without losing time to productivity, then we may just have the perfect solution…
Microsoft Cloud talent creation
At Revolent, we developed our training model to hire, train, and deploy skilled, fully-certified and business-ready Microsoft professionals quickly and affordably. We understand how crucial soft skills and industry experience are in giving net-new tech talent a flying start. That’s why our program emphasizes soft skills training, such as consultancy acumen and stakeholder management, alongside in-demand Microsoft cloud skills and certifications. Equipped with these skills and abilities, tailored to your needs, our Revols are ready to make a difference on day one.
What’s more, all of our Revols have prior relevant tech or industry experience, and we handle all of their learning and development requirements, so you get all the benefits of their skills without the hassle of training. Plus, in addition to equipping them with the latest cloud knowledge, their training can be tailored to your business needs, making them an invaluable addition to your project team.
Revolent ReSkill
If you have existing Microsoft Cloud professionals, we can fast-track their skill sets to help you build more advanced Microsoft Cloud capabilities in your organization. And for tech employees who don’t have experience working with cloud solutions yet, we can help them undergo an in-depth skills transformation with our sought-after Microsoft Cloud training pathways.
As a Microsoft Learning Partner, our training is hands-on, with 60% spent on practical application and going well beyond the fundamentals. What’s more, our Microsoft-accredited, in-house training experts will assess your existing projects and business needs to tailor the training to build skills that your organization needs most.
