How to survive when your IT skills become irrelevant

The future of the talent in the IT function is a hotly debated topic – some commentators talk about the inevitable demise of the IT worker, while others eagerly anticipate what the future super-employee will look like when supported by digital technologies. But one thing is certain; change is upon us. IT professionals can no longer hide behind process-driven service delivery – because automation will tackle the bulk of the work. They can’t sit in the back office because technologies and business models are pushing customers into the heart of the business. With these factors and many more at play, as businesses grapple with digital and drive towards the HfS Digital OneOffice concept, the only professionals that will be able to evolve to meet the changing environment will be those that focus on adding real value to their businesses.

It should go without saying that the required skills of the future won’t be the same list of skills we value today. There is already a shift away from logical left-brain skills, which used to be the bread-and-butter of the IT industry, toward the creative, problem-solving right-brain capabilities that are now of considerable value in the modern IT services space. The key driver behind this shift is the highly anticipated impact of intelligent automation, which will soak up much of the rules-based and repetitive work that has pervaded the IT services space and reduce the need for talent to take on these right-brain roles. The cynical argument centres on the difficulty these displaced employees face when seeking new avenues of employment, potentially causing a widespread re-deployment and unemployment crisis. Meanwhile, a more optimistic school of thought focuses on the potential for liberating talent to undertake more meaningful work, with some arguing that an important part of this process will be for current employers to invest in retraining and redistributing talent to other areas of the value chain.

To get to those areas, however, professionals need to focus on evolving their attitude and skill-sets away from legacy IT to the new requirements of digital business. The definition of work is changing as enterprises leverage automation technologies to tackle lower-skilled labour, making traditional IT services work vulnerable. But with digital business models and customer-centrism bringing IT capabilities to the forefront of most business decisions, the opportunities are considerable. The creativity and critical thinking skills we discuss throughout this report are the most sought-after by enterprise leaders, with 50% stating this was a top-three skill requirement (see Exhibit 4), driven as they are by the increasing pressure to reimagine processes, products, and services that better meet the needs of the customer. There is a call for more entrepreneurial mind-sets – tech start-ups being not the only places where entrepreneurs thrive – as enterprises come to recognise that to face off disruptors in their market, they need to pack their teams with equally disruptive talent. Nowhere is this in more demand than in enterprise technology.

The role of future IT services professionals will be all about impact – using their technology mindsets to support their businesses in bringing customers to the core of their operations. Driving efficiency and reimaging processes that help their enterprise remain competitive in the cut-throat digital market. In an environment where IT is the lifeblood of an organisation, professionals that can balance commercial acumen with technological expertise are a prized commodity.

This is an important call to action for employers, to ensure they have the right environment to support these new skills sets, and that they have set up innovative training programmes to help guide professionals into areas of work that are best suited to their capabilities; to grow employees’ skills beyond the requirements of traditional IT.

The global market for traditional IT skills is in decline because of automation, AI and cloud. Here are the facts:

Let’s get the doom and gloom part out of the way first by painting a picture of current industry trends, taken from HfS market research, and the candid insights provided by enterprise leaders. The potential impact of automation is as likely to be exaggerated as it is to be downplayed, in most contemporary discussions. One thing is clear: there will be an impact, as increasing proportions of work are outsourced to intelligent automation platforms and technologies. In Exhibit 1, below, we can see the predicted impact on the service provider community, as low-skill work is eroded at an accelerating pace, while more mid- and high-skilled opportunities develop. Crucially, though, the drop in low-skilled work will be much greater than the growth in high-skilled work.

Exhibit 1: Impact of automation and AI on IT and BPO workers 2015-2022

Source: HfS Research, 2018

A part of this is likely to be due to a skills gap, rather than the anticipated outcome of a simple lack of jobs. If there is one thing recent HfS research into key IT Services areas tells us, it’s that there is strong demand for key talent across the board, particularly in the higher skill areas. This “talent war”, as it’s increasingly called, is unlikely to disappear as automation expands its influence. The nature of such higher-skilled work is such that it simply cannot be automated (at least, not yet). Service providers are crying out for creative problem-solvers, designers, and subject matter experts, to help them to provide the services and solutions that the growing digital market is calling for. While some providers are working to gather the skills through attraction and retention programs, and acquisitions and mergers, there is still an avenue that is relatively little explored: the vast untapped talent pools that sit in other areas of provider delivery networks.[1]

Critical Thinking is the hottest skill IT pros have to develop

Now that we’ve created a turbulent backdrop for the IT services talent market, let’s dig into the important stuff. If employers and employees are to retrain, what are they to retrain in? To point us in the right direction, we have some valuable data from enterprise leaders about which skill-sets they believe will be essential to the future of their businesses.

In 2017, HfS completed some research into the state of the outsourcing industry, which captured the key talent demands and the ongoing struggle attracting this talent (see Exhibit 2 and 3). In the first chart, we can see the top three talent requirements for operational staff (including IT), from the perspective of enterprise leaders. Critical thinking, creativity, and complex problem-solving are all in-demand skills, which are unlikely to be readily supplanted by technologies such as automation. In the second table, we can see which skills businesses are struggling to find. These tally up considerably, with those in most demand – complex problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity – making the top of the talent requirements list.

Exhibit 2: The most in-demand skills for IT Service Professionals

Source: HfS Research in conjunction with KPMG, State of Operations and Outsourcing 2017, n=454 enterprise buyers

Exhibit 3: The hardest-to-find skills for IT Service Professionals

Source: HfS Research in conjunction with KPMG, State of Operations and Outsourcing 2017, n=454 enterprise buyers

In Exhibit 4, below, we can see that this trend continues to push towards an era dependent on having an innovative workforce. While several years ago we may have expected to see technology-centric capabilities and skills focused on process and delivery, we now see a whole new set of requirements for the future of the enterprise.

Key requirements have shifted toward creativity and stakeholder management capabilities. The most highly anticipated requirements focus on creative, entrepreneurial spirit, and curiosity for innovation; exploring new ways of partnering across the services ecosystem, and commercial acumen. Commercial acumen is a broader skill-base that encapsulates the shifting demands of the modern business world, affecting people, processes, and technology.

All of these capabilities may seem disparate at first, but when contextualised in shifting business models they’re all concerned with business re-imagination – using commercial and technical knowledge to bring the customer to the centre of decision-making. There are many examples of this in action – for instance, IT Service Management, which focused traditionally on formulaic and rules-based processes such as incident management and request fulfilment. But now more and more of these processes are being  automated, freeing up talent to tackle higher value areas, such as:

• Problem management, which needs a foundation of critical thinking and complex problem-solving to reduce the number and significance of IT issues.
• Change and/or project management, which are shifting from siloed IT development and implement-ation, onto bringing the customer more into the mix. This reuires IT professionals who understand the technologies, the business, and can convey this in a format that is digestible to all stakeholders.

Additionally, there is the role of Continual Service Improvement – often reserved for senior professionals but now a growing building block of modern enterprises striving to meet customer expectations. Consider, for example, the significant work and talent that goes into designing and implementing a cognitive chatbot that can get to the crux of customer issues while navigating the processes, knowledge, and data of the enterprise. Or the development of applications that remove friction from customer engagements and help the business compete in the digital space.

The changing nature of IT work is pushing enterprises to re-evaluate the skills and attributes needed in their IT teams to close the gap between legacy IT and the modern digital organisation. However, these broader requirements will undoubtedly be tougher to train for.  Enterprises need to make more of  mentoring, coaching, and experience-led training. This places the onus on employers to start building programs for retraining now, or risk the considerable consequences if it’s left too late.

Exhibit 4: Top skills requirements for the modern enterprise

Source: HfS Research, 2018

We polled the audience at a recent HfS event to gauge the expected impact of automation on their business and their plans for mitigating this impact through retraining and redeployment plans. As shown in the screen-shot below, a startling 40% recognized that automation would have a considerable impact on their business, but at the time had no plans on how to tackle it.

Often the focus on the retraining and redeploying narrative is overtaken by socio-political, moral and ethical arguments, but there are also considerable business risks of not recognizing the issues, of not acting on them, now. When we surveyed enterprise leaders and asked what the biggest challenges were to their achievement of business goals, a lack of talent was the second-most cited cause, with the perennial problem of change-resistance taking the top billing (see Exhibit 5, below). Today’s businesses need high-quality talent with the right skills to drive the attainment of business goals. They need to establish a sustainable talent pool, which means investing in the development and retraining of talent… now.

Exhibit 5: Biggest barriers to reaching business goals

Source: HfS Research, 2018

Retraining, it’s just that easy, right?

It’s far too easy to say: “Let’s marry up the ongoing talent-crunch with the high-demand job roles of the future; let’s start retraining people to fill those gaps!” The trouble is that it’s simply unrealistic and logistically implausible. For one thing, many of the most in-demand capabilities are exactly that, capabilities – not the types of siloed skill-sets we’ve been able to retrain and redistribute in the past. Retraining someone to tackle another area of a production line because their role has been automated is a different ball-park entirely to that of retraining someone to think critically, or to wrap their mind around complex problem-solving. It’s simply not realistic to jump to the conclusion that retraining is the only thing standing between an employee in a contact centre and the skills needed to develop machine learning solutions. While some effort and resources should go into developing these skills, of course, the ramifications of automation for IT services talent are more far-reaching.

Another challenge is presented by geography. Many of the roles that automation is likely to replace in the IT services space are in major “off-shoring” locations such as India, or the Philippines, which have developed their education systems to produce the skill-sets needed for the traditional IT services space. In these countries, entire education systems will need to change to shift mindsets away from current transactional thinking to the more creative thought processes soon to be in high demand. A prime opportunity for doing so would be to work with service providers directly to develop education programmes that help build out the skills and capabilities they need early in the academic cycle. Forming partnerships between universities, colleges and service providers is, to an extent, already taking place. But this must extend to enriching and developing these partnerships through on-the-job training opportunities, apprenticeships, and feedback loops that critically assess the skills necessary in the modern business and how to develop them. This will boost the prospects of future service professionals, and the abilities of service providers to satisfy the growing demand for talent.

Thirdly, there is the challenge of modern business culture. Although business models vary considerably, a significant majority of major companies have a centralized decision-making structure, with much of the critical thinking contained at the upper echelons of management. Culturally, the current business model status quo leaves little room for devolved decision-making, or for junior employees developing their critical thinking and problem-solving capabilities in a business environment. This fosters a restrictive culture in which the challenge of evolving mindsets is compounded further, and digital talent is harder to locate. All of these challenges (and many more macro-economic trends) are leading to labour resources that are likely to fall far short of the required capabilities for the modern business, with large pools of IT service workers struggling to find a suitable environment that will allow them to deliver value with their legacy skill-sets.

The bottom line: you may already be irrelevant… but it may not yet be too late!

There are solutions that can mitigate, if not remedy, these challenges. Foremost are individual IT service workers needing to critically assess which skills they have and what they need to add to continue delivering value to the business.

Secondly, major outsourcing destinations must recognize the mismatches in their education systems and fill these gaps – focusing on the development of open-minded critical thinking and problem-solving capabilities. Service providers can offer considerable support to education establishments, and both educational establishments and providers can benefit considerably by partnering together and working on building curricula that make sense in the modern digital services market.

Finally, enterprises and providers alike must work to re-evaluate their business models and identify forward-looking digital approaches to business. By employing such approaches, they should endeavour to build work-environments that allow talent to develop in the right areas, through both structured training and the evolution of the right kinds of business culture.

To break the back of the ongoing talent crisis, and to face the significant industry changes being brought about through intelligent automation, business leaders and employees must act now to ensure there is a sustainable talent pool with the right skills and capabilities to move services on into the future. To help you on this journey, the following infographics reveal how you can rise to the challenge that the modern digital enterprise brings, whether you’re an IT Services professional or Leader.

HfS infographics: Digital Survival Guide for IT Service professionals and Leaders

6 ways to succeed as an IT professional

7 ways to stay relevant as an IT leader

[1] In the recent ServiceNow Services research, and indeed, many of the IT Services Blueprint reports, the impact of the talent war is leading providers to experiment with new methods of developing sustainable talent pools. Few were looking internally, however. Those that were, particularly the large Indian outsourcers, were reporting strong results as talent was distributed to more lucrative and in-demand areas.