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COVID-19 pushed companies over the edge and is forcing them to accelerate their digital transformations at lightning speeds. But what nobody is talking about is what those companies need to do to fill the talent gap and more importantly–for you as a worker, what you need to know before you apply for that next job.
In the past year and a half, digital adoption has taken a quantum leap in organizations and industries around the globe.
According to McKinsey, companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions along with their internal operations by as much as three to four years. And the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios by as much as seven years.
It’s no wonder then that 9 out of 10 businesses believe that accessing talent is critical to their future competitiveness. But how do they actually get access to the talent they need? And what do Talent need to do to find the jobs they want?
We know there aren’t clear answers out there for these questions–which is why we surveyed more than 150,000 open knowledge worker roles to find out more. You can get all those insights and more in our Knowledge Work Demand Index, an in-depth research report on the state of hiring.
What does this mass digitization mean for companies?
When we look at the ways COVID-19 accelerated digital transformation, it’s important to point out that very little of the technology enabling that transformation is new. We already had Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Team, and Google Meet in 2019. What we didn’t have was a compelling enough reason for change.
That is, until the pandemic.
Exhibit A is payments giant FIS. When the pandemic hit, they moved 95% of their 55,000 employees in 52 countries to home offices in just six weeks. That’s an unprecedented change at an unprecedented speed. And it wasn’t just them. At the time, this was happening in thousands of companies in countries all over the world.
This mass digital transformation wasn’t just internal, though. In order for businesses to truly transform, they needed to do more than just move to a WFH model. To keep up with the way customers were going digital, they needed to build highly optimized ecommerce websites, develop apps to be more convenient, and so much more.
This meant that more and more companies needed to become tech companies.
To become a tech company, you first need to hire tech Talent.
Out of the 150,000+ open knowledge worker roles that Braintrust analyzed, 29% of them were tech roles. In Europe alone, nearly 900,000 new ads for tech roles were published in the first quarter of 2021, according to CompTIA’s latest research. This meant that the total number of vacancies jumped as much as 40% compared to the third quarter of 2020.
And because more companies are becoming tech companies, it’s not just the tech industry that is hiring. Outside of the Technology industry, enterprises in Industrial and Consumer industries currently have the largest talent gaps.
Click here to check out the top 10 companies hiring the most tech talent.
The future of work presents as much opportunity as it does change.
Today’s unprecedented need for companies to become tech companies and along with it, the unprecedented demand for Talent, mean one thing: there’s plenty of opportunity out there for everybody.
But in order to realize that opportunity and get access to the talent they need, enterprises first need to show us that they’re willing to evolve. The quicker they do, the more they’ll benefit.
For Talent, opportunities will mean:
- Better opportunities: Each new tech company means a new opportunity for today’s knowledge worker. And because they’re now digital, it means they can access more opportunities in more places.
- More variety: Before COVID-19, if you wanted to work for a tech company, you needed to move to a tech hub where you were limited to the local pool of employers. Now the pool of future employers is as big as you want it to be.
- Bigger impact: When you limit yourself to traditional tech companies or specific geographic locations, you’re also limiting the impact you can make. Thanks to technology and the mass-digitization of companies, workers can now make a bigger dent in the world.
For enterprises, opportunities will mean:
- Better talent: Now that companies aren’t limited to workers within a 25-mile radius, they can access the world’s best talent regardless of their time zone. Want to hire a data scientist that has experience working with major enterprises like Facebook and Google? Now you can.
- Faster transformation: Before COVID-19, when most companies were stuck on FTE, it took upwards of three months to onboard a new employee. Today, you can hire 8X faster so that your transformation doesn’t have to wait.
- Bigger goals: When you have access to better talent and can onboard them in a matter of days, all of a sudden your quarterly goals become absurdly small. That’s why some companies are now able to triple their capacity.
So how do companies need to evolve in order to seize these opportunities?
