Illustration representing the tech skills talent gap

Closing the Tech Talent Gap

To keep pace with innovation, organizations must help software engineers and IT pros build both hard and soft skills.

Software engineers and IT pros are in high demand.

The International Data Corporation (IDC) has predicted a global shortfall of 4 million developers by 2025. This fierce competition makes talent development mission-critical.

Help software engineers and IT pros (“technology pros” for the purposes of this report) gain both hard and soft skills, and your organization will retain them and grow them into leaders who will advance your business.

The speed of skills

As skills evolve, technology pros need continuous upskilling to keep up

The skills required for many jobs have changed by 25% since 2015, and that number is expected to reach at least 65% by 2030, according to LinkedIn's latest report on AI at Work.

Training your talent on emerging technology and new skills will help your company and your employees keep pace — and will attract and retain the employees who will drive your business.

And although compensation has long been the top-ranked factor in attracting and retaining technology pros, today career development is just as important.

It's 2.5x more expensive to hire a new employee than to reskill a current one.

89% of L&D professionals agree that proactively building employee skills will help navigate the future of work, according to LinkedIn’s 2023 Workplace Learning Report.

The key is knowing which skills matter most in a changing environment. Check out LinkedIn platform data on the top hard skills in engineering and IT professions.

52% of technology pros on LinkedIn who update their skills regularly do so every quarter — illustrating the ongoing need for technical reskilling.

Katie Bunker
Senior Director, People and Culture, Edifecs

“The average shelf life of technical skills is 5 years, and the average shelf life of deeply technical skills is 2.5 years. We need to be thinking about holistic, continuous development, especially for our technical talent.”

Explore how Edifecs upskills their technical workers here.

Holistic upskilling

Investing in soft skills creates well-rounded, agile technology pros

Investing in soft skills such as communication, teamwork, and problem solving creates well-rounded, agile employees. This holistic approach to skilling increases retention, helps employees develop their careers, and helps companies meet and exceed financial targets.

These tech employees are not only doing great work today — but have the skills to lead teams, solve complex problems, and make a bigger impact on your business tomorrow.

LinkedIn platform data sheds light on just how powerful holistic upskilling that leads to internal advancement can be:

Building soft skills leads to over 13% faster advancement

Technology pros who have developed one or more of these soft skills — Communication, Teamwork, Problem Solving, or Leadership — in addition to hard skills get promoted over 13% faster than employees who have only hard skills.

Take LinkedIn's top courses in these 4 core soft skills here

Elevate your tech team with these 4 free soft-skills courses

Courses unlocked through December 31, 2023.

Communication:

Communication Skills for Modern Management

Jean-Marie DiGiovanna

Teamwork:

Teamwork Essentials: Stand Out as a Valuable Team Member

Shadé Zahrai

Problem-solving:

Strategic Thinking Tips to Solve Problems and Innovate

AJ Eckstein

Leadership:

Finding Your Leadership Purpose

Doug Conant and Amy Federman

"Career Development is fundamental to our employee value proposition, and learning is a key business metric."

Rajnish Borah

Global Head of Organization Effectiveness & Learning, WNS Global Services

AI acceleration

AI will only accelerate the need for continuous upskilling and reskilling for technology pros

About 51% of U.S. executives are excited about AI advancements, but do not yet know how they will leverage AI tools and skills, according to LinkedIn's latest report on AI at Work. However, they are confident this new technology will increase productivity and even unlock some revenue opportunities.

And a recent survey found that workers across generations would “rather undergo training to reskill for a new role at their current company than pursue a different position if their job was at risk.”

82% of leaders say their employees will need new skills to be prepared for the growth of AI.

44% of U.S. executives agree that they are planning to increase their use of AI at their organization in the next year.

LinkedIn data shows a 65% increase in learning hours for the top 100 AI/GAI courses from 2022 to 2023.

"Your ability to hire, retain, train, and redeploy people is not going to be easy going forward. That’s why HR is so important."

Josh Bersin

HR Global Industry Analyst

The Takeaway

"Businesses need new skills at a rate faster than I’ve ever seen before — which means they need to help their employees evolve via upskilling and internal mobility. In years past, companies might have relied more on talent acquisition to “buy” the new skills they needed, but that strategy no longer works in isolation for today’s labor market and business environment."

Jennifer Shappley, VP of Talent at LinkedIn, in LinkedIn’s latest Global Talent Trends Report

Methodology:

The analysis on skills leading to advancement examines the aggregated and anonymized LinkedIn data from members employed full-time who added skills explicitly to their profile and were promoted internally between July 1, 2019, and June 30, 2023. As defined by LinkedIn Taxonomy, soft skills primarily affect a person’s behavior, thinking, or knowledge while hard skills primarily affect an object and include specialized domain knowledge and technical know-how. The time to promotion is measured by the difference in the start dates between an employee’s previous role and the role they were promoted into.