Closing the skills gap

Author: TD SYNNEX Newsflash Published: 17th March 2022

We know there is a lack of IT skills at the moment, but what can we do about it?

Andy Brown, Technical Services Director, TD SYNNEX

In a recent LinkedIn post, Andy Brown technical services director at TD SYNNEX, talked about ‘The Great Resignation’¹ There has been an upsurge in demand for skilled IT people and channel businesses have seen higher rates of attrition.

While TD SYNNEX can help them plug some gaps, partners need to ensure they can find and retain their own skilled staff. But how? Interestingly, the answer in both the short and long terms would seem to be broadly the same.

First, make sure you have the right working culture, and you are in-tune with the current needs of employees. Needs and expectations have changed. Second, put professional and career development pathways in place and look to bring in untapped talent. Don’t be afraid to encourage employees to retrain or to recruit from other industries.

Change your culture

Culturally, IT businesses now need to fully embrace flexible working, provide career and knowledge development opportunities, show that they care about and will listen to employees, and demonstrate that they give everyone a fair chance.

Everyone should be empowered to take ownership of their own skills development

In a video discussion with Andy Brown (which you can also see on LinkedIn²), Michelle Becker, talent acquisition manager at TD SYNNEX, said that most people applying for jobs now want to work remotely and flexibly. While salary still matters, culture and progression opportunities are more important.

We also asked CompTIA and industry members of its UK Business Technology Community’s executive council to give us their views. Zeshan Sattar, director, learning and skills certification at the organisation, told us that a good approach is to assess current skills, identify gaps, and then build what he calls a ‘learning culture’.

Within that, he noted, it’s important to have both competition and a nurturing approach. ‘Everyone should be empowered to take ownership of their own skills development. But this needs to be encouraged. The business needs to run learning events, set hard deadlines, and make learning a part of all company-wide communications and events.’

One option here, he suggested, is to get involved with the Department for Education’s (DfE) Skills Bootcamps, which require companies to pay only part of the cost³. You can of course, also run your own internal programme, make use of vendor resources, and those made available by TD SYNNEX.

Give people a voice

Businesses also need to give employees a voice, said TD SYNNEX’s Michelle Becker. ‘How we treat people is important. People want to be able to speak up. Command and control just won’t work anymore.’

Businesses need to make sure they have a plan to become more sustainable

TD SYNNEX has adopted a servant-leadership approach and that seems to be working well. This is where managers view themselves as ‘servants’ of their workers; their role is to enable people to do the best job they can.

Other things potential new recruits ask about are sustainability and inclusion. Businesses need to make sure they have a plan to become more sustainable, they also need to ensure that their recruitment process is equitable and fair, and people from different gender and racial identities feel that the roles are open to them.

Think differently

Dan Scott, who is IT Nation community manager – EMEA at ConnectWise, and vice chair of CompTIA’s UK Business Technology Community executive council, said that IT businesses need to think differently about recruitment, training, and retention.

If we keep doing what we’ve always done to attract and retain the people in our industry, the echo chamber effect will continue

‘Diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, are words that are (thankfully) often used today and they are also the solution to this particular problem. If we keep doing what we’ve always done to attract and retain the people in our industry, the echo chamber effect will continue, and we’ll still have skills gaps.’

Getting more people involved from different backgrounds is something that needs to be done consciously. TD SYNNEX has an active policy on diversity, equity and inclusion and has made efforts to balance the gender mix of its technical teams in particular.

There is a big imbalance on DEI in the industry as a whole. The UK tech industry is made up of only 17% of females⁴ and 15% are from an ethnic minority background. This needs to be actively addressed through recruitment said CompTIA’s Zeshan Sattar. By doing that, businesses will not only have access to a bigger talent pool, but will also benefit in other ways.

‘Any initiative used by a company to get new talent should also make a concerted effort to increase diversity. This helps with understanding a range of viewpoints and can stimulate innovative approaches that will ultimately benefit the business.’

Talk differently

We also need to talk about technology differently, said Olivia Donnell, senior director, EMEA channel sales, StorageCraft and member of the CompTIA community’s executive board.

To my knowledge you cannot take exams at any level of formal education in cloud, IoT and so on

‘To attract young talent and skilled talent we absolutely must drop these industry specific terms that people don’t know and don’t understand. We need to change our language and talk about engineering, economics, research, maths, sales, marketing, PR, logistics, cabling, wiring, CCTV, data, telephony, analytics, accounting, and yes, coding. To my knowledge you cannot take exams at any level of formal education in cloud, IoT and so on.’

Looking to other industries for transferable talent also has potential, said Michelle Becker. She believes the pandemic has raised awareness of technology as a potential career for many, even for people who don't have the skills today but will be willing to learn.

Cross train and transfer

The problem of the education system giving potential employees the wrong up-front impression of our industry is one that won’t go away soon. Another approach is to try and give people new skills and abilities – by taking them from other parts of the business and training them.

I’m keen to impress the idea of taking employees that you already have and nurturing them

TD SYNNEX has been trying to do this in a number of ways, as Andy Brown explained: ‘The easiest talent to foster is that which already sits within the business. Within the TD SYNNEX Technical Community, we lead with an internal recruitment policy where we offer inter-community progression but also intra-company transition. This enables us to develop existing employees who represent our company values and understand the mechanics of IT distribution and develop their technical aptitude.’

It has also been running internal development training. Datacentre specialists have been given the opportunity to cross train in public cloud technologies and it is now extending that programme out to partners. Andy Brown said: ‘Whilst recruitment from outside the business is, and always will be, an important tool in discovering talent, I’m keen to impress the idea of taking employees that you already have and nurturing them.’

CompTIA’s Zeshan Sattar advocates this approach too. People who have developed what might be called ‘softer’ or perhaps more suitably, ‘durable’ skills in other, non IT-related areas of the business may be able to transfer those talents. ‘These people have excellent interpersonal skills and understand the value of customer service. Hence, short programmes can be utilised to equip them with the technology competencies needed for them to add value to an organisation from day one.’

Dan Scott said that non-technical skills should not be underestimated. ‘You can’t change the world with technology if you can’t communicate the problems you’re fixing and the benefits the fixes bring. Aligning technology to outcomes is a fine art, but the focus is often on technical skills first as they’re easier to quantify.’

Train up

It’s also worth training people from scratch, said TD SYNNEX’s Michelle Becker. ‘Finding the skill-sets we need is really hard, and we do need to be more open-minded, looking at transferable skills and taking people on a more junior level and training them up and moulding them into what we want them to be.’

TD SYNNEX has run three IT technical sales apprenticeship schemes and seen excellent completion rates

Apprenticeships are a good way to develop skilled people. TD SYNNEX has been running a technical sales scheme for over three years now. It also launched another more technically focused programme last year. These are open to everyone in the business, regardless of experience level.

To date, TD SYNNEX has run three IT technical sales apprenticeship schemes and seen excellent completion and retention rates. In another video discussion, Andy Brown spoke to Sandie Jackson, apprentice programme manager at TD SYNNEX, and Naomi Pierce, a technical presales specialist at the company about the way apprenticeship programmes are being used to grow in-house skills and reduce attrition rates⁵.

Companies of any size can run apprenticeship schemes. There are plenty of providers and government funding is available. If you have a wage bill of under £3 million a year, you will pay 5% of the cost and the government will cover the remaining 95%.

Bigger firms are asked to put 0.5% of their wage bill into a fund, to which the government will add 10%. You commit to training apprentices and allocating 20% of their time for formal training. You can have six or more people in each cohort, and schemes can run from 12 months or more. The apprentices will come out at the end with recognisable qualifications and, if the training has been right, as individuals who are capable of making a valuable contribution to the business.

Whatever you do – change

To address the skills gap effectively, the industry needs to change, said Dan Scott. ‘Technology is changing, the deliverables and outcomes of our industry are changing, but we aren’t changing how we look to attract people in, and so we don’t have enough of the “right people.”

Show people, no matter who they are or where they come from, that they can find that spark

‘I can rattle off cyber, AI, ML, emtech, service excellence, fintech, blockchain, big data – they’re symptoms rather than the underlying condition of not having the right people coming through into the industry.

‘Show people, no matter who they are or where they come from, that they can find that spark and challenge what they are looking for in the technology industry – and that the industry wants them – and the problem will fix itself.’