If you’re a cloud technology consumer or a consultancy equipping businesses with the solutions they need to work more effectively, you’ll know that people are the engine that drives tech success.
From implementing cloud platforms to creating bespoke customizations and ensuring ongoing performance and cost efficiency, realizing the full potential of cloud tech requires knowledgeable hands.
However, hiring tech talent is not easy—and as more organizations look to implement cloud technology platforms, and demand for talent continues to increase, it’s not going to get easier. But the answer to the cloud skills shortage could be closer to home than you think.
The consequences of the cloud skills gap
With cloud adoption growing and creating jobs at a staggering rate, there’s no realistic way to create net new cloud professionals at the rate they’re needed. But that doesn’t mean that businesses can’t get access to the skills required to make the most of cloud tech, or help other organizations achieve their digital goals.
The ongoing battle over the relatively small pool of existing cloud professionals is not only driving up salaries, but it’s also creating a backlog of cloud projects due to lengthy time-to-hire periods for those organisations that can afford to bring talent on board.
Implementations are being shelved, plans scaled back, and growth stymied due to a lack of access to the necessary skills. The Global Knowledge IT Skills and Salary Report found that 70% of IT decision-makers reported that a lack of cloud technology skills has resulted in a decrease in productivity and efficiency in their organizations.
Another study by IDC reported that shortcomings in critical skills creation and training efforts by IT industry leaders will prevent 65% of businesses from achieving full value from cloud, data, and automation investments by 2024.
And these shortfalls come with a price tag: In a study conducted by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), it was estimated that the shortage of cloud computing skills in the UK alone could cost the economy £141.5 billion in GDP growth by 2028.
As a result, businesses are looking at alternative ways to bring cloud skills into their teams. One of the most powerful of these methods is also the simplest: turning existing employees into cloud tech stars through training and certification.
Reskilling and upskilling: The path to an effective tech team
Addressing the tech skills gap by training existing employees is a solution that’s available to every business. It makes sense: in any situation where resources are scarce, you work with what you have. And with a wide range of roles and high-quality training available to budding tech professionals, you might be surprised how effective reskilling and upskilling employees into cloud tech roles can be.
But first things first, let’s define these two key terms.
What is reskilling?
Reskilling involves training employees with existing tech skills and experience up on a new platform. For example, familiarizing the administrator of a legacy ERP system with a new-generation cloud platform, or a solution from a different vendor than they’re accustomed to. It’s a more lateral type of training that aims to refocus existing skills and knowledge into a different area or product.
What is upskilling?
Upskilling involves providing advanced training to employees in a technology they are already familiar with. This type of training is ideal for employees who have shown an aptitude or enthusiasm for the tech solutions they’ve worked with in their roles, especially those that have come to be recognized as the unofficial trouble-shooter or ‘super user’ of a cloud product.
The good news for businesses is that research suggests most employees would jump at the chance to skill grow their skills and future-proof their career options. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report found that 94% of employees would be willing to reskill if their employer provided the opportunity.
However, a recent edition of the same report found that while 81% of companies believe investing in learning and on-the-job training to be a key tactic for achieving business goals, only a third (34%) considered providing reskilling and upskilling as a way to increase talent availability.
Let’s take a closer look at how reskilling and upskilling offer the potential to build cloud tech skills into your team without entering into the fierce battle for existing talent, as well as some of the benefits.
5 benefits to reskilling and upskilling your team
#1: Maximize value gained from cloud solutions
Knowledge, as they say, is power. And that definitely applies to the kind of complex, powerful cloud solutions that businesses have access to today. The more knowledgeable your team is, the more they’re going to get out of your chosen cloud platform. Though many cloud products are designed to be easy to use right off the shelf, there’s a limit to what you can do without a dedicated cloud professional in your corner. Understanding the functionality of a solution, knowing how to optimize it to achieve the best performance, and being able to configure and customize it to better meet business needs makes a massive difference to what you can achieve with it.
A study by IDG reports that 69% of organizations believe having in-house cloud expertise is critical to their success. This is primarily because having skilled cloud professionals allows businesses to customize cloud environments quickly and adapt to changing requirements.
#2: Improve employee productivity
Given the huge impact that a lack of cloud tech skills can have on productivity, it’s evident that having people who can fully utilize cloud solutions within your business makes for better productivity. One of the biggest benefits of cloud solutions is that they tend to make performing business-related tasks easier, faster, and more efficient. Employees that know how to use this functionality properly will be able to work smarter, dedicating less time to manual workloads and more time to things that make use of their skills and drive value.
#3: Reduce costs long-term
Anyone who works with cloud technology, whether as a customer or a service provider, knows how costly it can be to bring new talent into the business. Salaries remain high, and the process of finding and onboarding the right candidate can be long, eating into the time and productivity of other team members.
There are obviously costs that come with reskilling and upskilling, especially if you want to make sure your employees are getting valuable, high-quality training. But these costs can pale in comparison to the cost of hiring new employees, both in the long and short term.
Then, there’s the increase in operating costs due to lost productivity and poor operational efficiency. With skilled professionals at the helm of your cloud solution, you can better utilize the cost-saving features it offers. Operations can be streamlined, tasks automated, and processes optimized, all of which will cut operational overheads going forward. Employees that are better educated about cloud tech will also be less likely to present a security risk, lowering potential costs involved in mitigating a data breach or security issue.
And that’s just cash saved. There’s also the additional revenue that more highly skilled employees can generate; the WEF’s Global Upskilling Imperative report estimates that upskilling the global workforce could generate $6.5 trillion in additional GDP by 2030.
#4: Boost engagement and retention
Our sister company, AWS recruitment firm Jefferson Frank, recently conducted its own research into the AWS marketplace. Speaking to cloud professionals, the report found that a lack of career and promotional prospects was the top reason employees look for a new role. On an interesting note for organizations that use cloud, 67% of respondents to the same survey said better training and learning opportunities is one of the top motivators to change roles.
Clearly, professional development is important to employees. And when they’re given the chance to grow into new roles and build new skills, they tend to be happier and stick around longer. In fact, LinkedIn Learning’s 2021 Workplace Learning Report revealed that 94% of employees would stay longer at a company if it invested in their career development through upskilling programs.
Promoting from the inside and retaining employees makes for more engaged, more productive employees, reducing turnover, loss of acquired knowledge, and hiring costs in the process.
#5: Gain a competitive edge
Adding new cloud skills to your team allows you to tap into new streams of business and better compete within your industry. The scalability and flexibility that cloud platforms offer make businesses uniquely capable of leveraging the latest technologies and adapting quickly to any changes in the market.
As a result, upskilling employees also helps businesses expand their capacity, competencies, and scope of delivery. The connection between upskilling and profitability is especially relevant for organizations that use cloud products and services. By adding more skills and certifications to your bench, you’ll be able to demonstrate your expertise and position yourself as a partner of choice. By investing in your employees’ skills development and showing that you’re actively thinking about ways to stay on the cutting edge of technology developments will result in better exposure not only to your prospective clients, but cloud vendors, too. They may reward you with more visibility within the ecosystem they operate in, helping you attract new business and land more projects.
Getting started with upskilling and reskilling
Revolent has been training and creating skilled cloud tech professionals since 2020. In that time, we have helped people earn over 1300+ certifications; and we can help your organization generate certified or accredited employees, too.
Covering Salesforce, AWS and Microsoft Cloud products, our ReSkill and UpSkill programs are designed to imbue your employees with practical, business-ready cloud skills and certifications. These programs empower your business to build advanced, specialist cloud capabilities in-house, tailored around your existing projects and business needs, with minimal disruption to business continuity.
And with an industry-leading first-time pass rate of 83% and 60% of time spent on practical, hands-on learning, you can be sure that training participants will be ready to make an immediate impact in your business. Here’s how our two training options work:
ReSkill your teams
The best choice for re-training your employees from one cloud technology into another, this program is especially useful for businesses migrating to new cloud solutions or operating a multi-cloud model.
- Save on hiring costs by building skills internally with existing resource
- Diversify your teams’ skill sets and make better use of your cloud stack
- Increase retention by investing in employees’ development and boosting engagement
UpSkill your teams
Designed to equip your existing cloud technology consultants with more advanced skills and certifications, increasing utilization of your chosen platform, and boosting retention in the process, UpSkill is a great option for employers looking to boost their capabilities.
- Improve talent utilization and increase capabilities
- Fill your cloud skills gaps and tackle a wider variety of projects
- Increase employee productivity and scope of delivery
