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'Finding the right skill is a huge challenge'

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Deepa
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With the onset of new technologies such as virtualization, cloud, BYOD, big data and so on, enterprise community is set forth for a year transformation. However, do they have the right skills at place to make it possible? Which are the areas that are lacking in terms of dearth of skill and what are their plans to overcome these skill deficiencies? These are some of the survey questions that were put forth to a section of CIOs, about 100 of them, during the recent the C-Change 2013 conference.

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Over 95 per cent of CIOs, who took the 'Survey on IT Skill', said that IT skills is indeed a priority area for them. Some of the major areas where they are struggling to find the right skills are project and change managements, social media, web and mobile platforms, business negotiation, cyber compliance, new technologies etc.

When asked what are the IT human resource issues that they face today, a majority (87 per cent) of them said 'quality of skills', whereas, for about 26 per cent of them it was cost. A few of them pointed out issues such as attrition, gaps on desired competency etc are also top concerns.

This could be the reason why nearly 50 per cent of the CIOs remarked that skills available externally fare better in comparison to in-house skills. However, a majority of them will still prefer in-house skills over external ones due to reasons such as cost and compliance among others.

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With regards to areas where acquiring skill sets are a major challenge, a large section, 71 per cent, of them pointed out programming, software management, application development, maintenance and support. Whereas, for about 47 per cent of the CIOs storage and networking are the two major areas where lack of right skills pose a challenge.

About 26 per cent of the CIOs said that acquiring skilled hardware professionals are an issue today. An equal amount of CIOs also said that communication, user-oriented and soft skills are also very difficult to get. Meanwhile, a few others pointed out at areas such as database management, business analytics, virtualization, security etc.

Although, a large number of CIOs agreed that open source based applications do help enterprises in easing out IT management, finding skilled professionals who can help them deploy it is challenging. A few others pointed out that the cost of such open-source based community driven projects are very high and sometimes are not suited for enterprise environment.

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