The transition into the post-pandemic era has brought certain perpetual challenges for all professions, but especially for the IT sector. Whether a startup or a conglomerate, every IT company is facing these challenges at some or the other level. However, that should not stop us from carefully studying these problems and taking proactive measures to tackle them or at least keep them contained. Here are some of the biggest challenges of the IT industry today and how we can keep a grip over them.
Talent Acquisition
An IT company has a long list of requirements depending on our client base, and it is a huge task to find professionals with the required skill sets to get on board. Even during economically challenging times like these, it is difficult to find skilled data analysts, coders, and other professionals that will truly provide value in their hiring. The key to handling this problem is having spot-on internal communication and a proactive talent acquisition team.
Unless every person from your talent acquisition team knows exactly the skills you are looking for in a professional and is actively searching for them, your company will always have a lack of skilled employees. Parallelly, it is also vital to communicate to your talent acquisition department which areas to focus on and which job profiles to prioritise.
Talent Retention
Even if you can get the best talent to join your company, keeping them around for longer periods is also one of the biggest challenges for the IT industry. It takes time for any employee to become completely set in an organisation before they actively start bringing value to the company. However, employees these days stick with their company for a much shorter period of time on average to find better-paying options, and better prospects, among other factors.
It is necessary to start giving employees who perform well better incentives at the right time to ensure that they do not start looking for other options in the first place. IT organisations must come up with more ways to improve career satisfaction among their workers.
Increased Workload
The Covid-19 pandemic saw an unprecedented increase in the workload as professionals from every sector moved to the ‘work from home’ option. Since then, IT professionals have been under extreme work pressure when it comes to coding and other technical aspects of maintaining software and websites. Increased workload under the same salary can strongly hit the morale of employees as an individual and as a group.
To provide temporary relief to this situation, IT companies can always consider hiring young interns that can drastically provide relief to your employees by handling the basic tasks. Parallelly, you will also be skilling them and potentially providing a new employment option for you.
Lack of skills
This industry can only thrive on the back of a well-skilled workforce that can adapt to evolving requirements and continue delivering results. Every company invests heavily in skilled professionals that can keep the ship running, especially when you have a diversified portfolio of clients. However, even if the company is ready to invest well in its employees, the world of IT is facing a severe shortage of skilled talent.
Hiring interns can be a solution to this problem as well, but it takes a long time to train interns, and whether they will stick around in your company is another concern. In that case, one can explore offering contract-based jobs and internships to youngsters so that the company may not have to invest too heavily in hires with limited skills.
Budget restrictions
Companies around the world are facing the after-effects of the current economic slowdown. There is a high chance of the global economy getting hit by a recession, and every organisation is thus looking to cut corners as far as hiring is concerned. The news of mass layoffs has further increased insecurity among aspirants, especially at a time when companies cannot make major employee-related commitments.
Unfortunately enough, IT companies are not left with many choices than to retain their employee base and freeze hiring new names. However, care must be taken to shield your current employees from any unnecessary pressure, as we cannot afford to drain our resources in finding and hiring new employees.
These are some of the biggest challenges for IT businesses at the moment that need urgent attention. Proactive and controlled measures can contain any situation if executed on time!