There are plenty of reasons to upskill your labour force, and especially your IT personnel. From improved employee satisfaction and retention to a better quality of service and diversified offerings, concentrating on improving your existing human capital before hiring new people is often a winning strategy. Your IT department is a particularly important point of focus because of how rapidly most companies and industries continue to digitize and move their operations online. With that as our backdrop, below are 5 ways to upskill your IT department in 2022.
Improve Data Management Capabilities
The vast majority of IT decision-makers believe their organizations should prioritize data governance/responsibility activities, implying that data management positions will become increasingly important to companies in order to help them make more informed choices and optimize operations. Any employer will always value the capacity to gather, organize, safeguard, and store data.
Improving your team’s data management skills is always a good idea, especially as firms become increasingly reliant on third-party storage and software. Both the company and its customers will benefit from better data management understanding. In addition to better manual data management skills, investing in things like compliance automation software is another good way to ensure customer and company data is safe and secure. Companies like Sprinto, Vanta, Tugboat Logic and SecureFrame all help streamline compliance.
Provide Opportunities for Software Development
With the ever-changing technological landscape, software engineers will become vital to firms that stay ahead of the curve. To be a good programmer, you need to have a grasp of common programming languages like Python and Java. Finding good software developers and people with strong programming backgrounds is difficult and expensive, so trying to build these skills on your team in an organic way can be a good alternative.
Your IT team will appreciate the opportunity to learn an in-demand value-added skill that will hopefully allow them to increase the contributions they make to the team and organization. It will also mean that you have access to programming knowledge and capabilities should you need them.
Improve AI Competencies
2021 saw a dramatic increase in companies’ experimentation with and adoption of AI. As we enter 2022, AI will increasingly become the norm and establish itself as critical to any company’s success, helping to provide insights for customers, partners, and employees in real time. AI skills that you can add to your team’s repertoire include everything from deployment and modelling to data analysis and engineering.
Improve Cloud Computing Skills
Cloud computing enables a single computer to access the shared resources and databases of other computers linked to the same network. Cloud computing is helpful since it allows you to save all of your files and data on outside databases rather than being restricted to local hard drives or storage devices. It has major implications for server space and infrastructure costs, allowing companies to scale up or down as needed.
There is a well-established cloud skills shortage that is actually the perfect justification for upskilling current team members with these capabilities. You can either hire and onboard new personnel with this background or you can provide people on your team with the opportunity to build a new skill set.
Develop Cybersecurity Skills
There are two ways that you can upskill your IT team with important cybersecurity skills. The first is with practical, hands-on technical abilities that allow them to do things like configuring a network, planning and carrying out a penetration test or deploying a firewall. The practical skills required in this field vary widely from company to company and industry to industry, but one thing is for certain: as the variety of security threats to businesses grows, there will be a corresponding need for greatly improved network security and experts to manage it all.
You can also upskill your team with the conceptual, technical knowledge they need to secure and monitor company systems. This is the technical knowledge that goes along with the practical hands-on experience, and it includes things like understanding the port numbers of various protocols, the levels of the OSI model, and the ability to subnet. This is the knowledge that will help your IT team do its job but is more difficult to transmit to other departments within the organization. Businesses are going to be increasingly interested in building out their existing human capital rather than taking chances on new hires.
Conclusion
Many businesses neglect the most important asset they already have: their existing staff. Because the rate of technological innovation shows no indications of stopping, IT skill needs will likewise evolve. Ask almost any IT professional, and they will no doubt confirm that the skills required to execute their work will change within the next five years. Rather than looking for new personnel, firms should anticipate this constant transformation and continuously enhance the skills of their existing staff.
