"Belgium's got talent, yet not enough digital experts". This article is based on thoughts shared during an online round table on March 31, 2022, where a select group of digital leaders met with speakers and organiser.
Speakers for this event were Saskia Van Uffelen and Jeroen Franssen.
Saskia Van Uffelen is a seasoned executive in the IT sector, Digital Champion for Belgium, working for the European commission and the federal government to foster the digital agenda in Belgium. Saskia is also leading Belgium's digital skills & jobs initiative and ambassador of BeTheChange program at Agoria.
Jeroen Fransen is the labour market specialist at Agoria, the largest sector federation in Belgium representing more than 2.000 technology companies.
Technology has changed society.
Everybody and everything is connected and everybody has acces to an overwhelming amount of data, very often incomplete and even fake. With new technology competition is no longer coming out of your own sector. Who will e.g. manage the charging stations for electric vehicles: electricity companies, car vendors, retailers, IT companies, communities, any company,...
The fast change in technology also came with a war for talent.
And it will only get worse. According to Agoria if nothing is done about it, there will be 60.000 open vacancies for digital experts in Belgium by 2030. Getting them out of the education system or hiring them from each other is not going to solve the shortage.
So what can be done?
We will need a solid activation program.
Belgium is the country where people work either 0% or 100%. We will also need people who work more than 0% and less than 100%. There is also a problematic mentality with young people. Only 2 out of 3 young adults work. That is not enough. The target is 4 out of 5. That's what our economy needs.
Young people seem scared of the idea that technical jobs require livelong learning. Fortunately we already went from the hard expression "ICT" to "IT" to the softer "digital", yet more needs to be done to make STEM studies and IT jobs popular. The digital generation should realise that their experience with digital tools can help them to have great jobs in IT departments, not necessarily in very technical positions.
Rather than checking the boxes of the ideal candidate for the job, companies should focus on people with the right attitude for the organisation and with the potential to be trained to do the job. The profile of people in IT departments is already very varied, with various educational backgrounds, only occasionally with an IT educational background.
In Belgium we are good in inventing, developing, selling and implementing new technologies yet not in guaranteeing effective use of these new technologies. CIO's need to avoid that talent or money is wasted and focus the investments on what really matters.
We will need continuous training.
We will need to train, to adapt ourselves, to hire raw talent and train them for the task at hand. People management has changed from controlling to motivating. Are the people who have moved up the ranks still the right managers for the future?
We will need to make non-IT people more digitally self-sufficient.
People in other departments be up-skilled and re-skilled to take on some of the traditional IT activities? Shadow-IT is no longer seen as a bad thing.
Accounting rules need to change.
Investment in up-skilling and re-skilling done this quarter have their return on investment much later. In order to motivate companies to invest in training, it should be possible to capitalise such investments.
Automation will allow us to be more efficient
RPA, AI and low code tools will help to automate the past and free up resources in particular information architects and developers.
We will need flexible sourcing.
More and more companies will need to make use of globally available IT consultants, interim managers, freelancers, off-shore and nearshore teams.
We will need to invest in retention.
Nobody wants to loose its IT people, let alone its best IT people with years of experience in serving the business, having built the business systems that are used every day. Top management and HR leadership should support CIO's in retaining their teams by empowering the CIO and by really investing in retention. Compensation, training, teambuilding activities and getting respect from the organisation are the key components. If IT departments are considered to be the guys that keep the lights on and are supposed to do this at the lowest possible cost, braindrain will become a very serious issue.