As enterprises and economies take leaps toward a digital future, certain technologies will serve as a catalyst for the success of their journeys. The cloud is one such key technology that has always driven innovation and transformation. However, as more and more organisations rush to adopt cloud technologies to improve efficiency, flexibility and sustainability, a growing gap in cloud skills is also coming to light.
Global research and analyst firm Gartner anticipates that the cloud market will be twice the size of the non-cloud IT market by 2025. In 2022 alone, the firm predicts that cloud revenue is estimated to total $474 billion globally with cloud bearing responsibility for nearly all of the 11 percent year-over-year growth in spending within the enterprise software segment.
Gartner experts also stipulate that an increasing number of cloud projects are failing today due to a lack of in-house skills and experience.
A growing concern
The shortage of the right talents results in a plethora of challenges for organisations. For one, the lack of well-versed cloud professionals impedes cloud adoption, migration and maturity within enterprises.
Bogged down with day-to-day business-critical tasks and increasingly complex IT architectures, enterprise IT teams are also struggling to address the cloud-focused needs of modern enterprises. This impedes businesses from evolving by quickly adopting and taking advantage of other emerging technologies.
The deficiency in cloud talents is also impacting innovation, causing high staff turnover and wage inflation. It also exacerbates other issues, deterring organisations from keeping up with the competitors’ digital growth, ensuring data protection and managing compliance. More alarmingly, this challenge also poses significant financial risks to businesses as IDC predicts that by 2022 the financial losses resulting from skills gaps will be $775 billion worldwide.
“As cloud adoption grows, demand for cloud related skills will also grow across the public and private sectors, as well as the partner and channel ecosystem,” explains Paul Misener, VP, Global Innovation Policy and Communications, Amazon.
“As such, it’s not an option to de-prioritise employee skills development. Organisations must be intentional about investing in and nurturing a culture that places cloud-skills learning at the forefront to attract and retain high-quality cloud talent. Furthermore, as new ways of working become the norm in our post-pandemic world, it’s more important than ever to reassess how your organisation prioritises employee development.”
Organisations that give their whole workforce an understanding of the cloud, and the vision behind transformation strategies, are in the best position to succeed in their digital transformations.
According to Misener, successful digital transformations start with cloud skills development for all employees—including IT, sales, marketing, finance, human resources, senior leadership, and more—to create cloud fluency.
“Cloud fluency empowers the team with cloud knowledge, from foundational to advanced technical expertise, creating a culture in which there’s a shared language of the cloud and understanding of its capabilities,” he says.
Misener adds, “Cloud-thinking embraces agility and the ability to fail fast. It leads to rapid proofs of concept that quickly show whether ideas and innovations will work, without spending big time and big money. It’s also a way of thinking that can fast-track innovations, from conception to viability across the business. In other words, when the organisation is cloud fluent, it can fully maximise its cloud investment and radically transform.”
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Closing the cloud skills gap
Ensuring people acquire the specific knowledge and experience required to meet the needs of the current job market is becoming increasingly important. A whopping 85 percent of workers report that they now need more technical knowledge to do their jobs as a result of changes in their work due to the pandemic, according to the AWS Global Digital Skills Study.
“Over the next decade, we expect the adoption of cloud computing across every industry will fuel a vast number of new jobs. As such, the greatest opportunity for workers is in building foundational cloud fluency, meaning a basic understanding of cloud, how it works, the opportunities for integration across lines of business within an organisation,” says Misener.
As cloud adoption grows, demand for cloud related skills will also grow across the public and private sectors. Narrowing the skills gap will need a top-down approach, which means business leaders need to invest in training, mentoring, and getting the right certifications for their employees. Cloud players are doing their part by making training and educational programmes more accessible to organisations. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a variety of educational training and certification programmes that help enterprises develop digital skills and adopt cloud technologies. The AWS Training and Certification enables businesses to drive transformation by equipping individuals and teams with the skills to innovate on AWS.
“Building foundational cloud fluency skills among staff in roles outside IT—such as sales, marketing, finance, HR, and more—are able to fast-track their organisation’s cloud innovations by streamlining operations, increasing agility, and reducing overall costs,” adds Misener.
In 2020, the company announced that it will provide free cloud skills training to 29 million people around the world by 2025. As part of this commitment, the following year the company introduced the AWS Skill Builder, which provides free digital cloud skills training to millions of people in more than 200 markets, including the UAE.
“To foster entrepreneurship and the growth of new businesses in the UAE, AWS will further expand the AWS Activate program to support the UAE’s startups and SMBs. AWS will continue to grow its training events in Abu Dhabi and Dubai to build a community of entrepreneurs, developers, and tech influencers. We will also work with government entities in Abu Dhabi and Dubai to support the up-skilling and re-training of people with the latest cloud computing training curriculum,” says Misener.
As part of its commitment to the UAE, AWS partnered with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) and launched a cloud training programme to upskill, train and certify small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the capital. The training programme builds on the existing relationship between ADIO and AWS, focused on boosting Abu Dhabi’s digital economy.
To equip students with the skills they need to get hired in one of the fastest-growing industries, AWS has expanded its AWS Educate and AWS Academy programs that prepare students to pursue industry-recognised credentials and in-demand jobs. AWS Educate enables UAE students as young as 13 with free access to hundreds of hours of training and resources curated specifically for new-to-the-cloud learners. In terms of driving education, AWS Academy offers educators at the Higher Colleges of Technology in Abu Dhabi and the Dubai campus of Murdoch University access to free, ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum centred on AWS innovations.
Today, it’s no longer enough to simply run applications in the cloud. It is important to note that while the cloud enables innovation, it’s the people who get the work done. For enterprises to get the most out of their cloud investments, outpace competitors, and ensure they’re well-equipped for the future, they need to arm their workforce with the right cloud skills and retain the best tech talent.
Check out this report to find out about how accelerating cloud skills will propel digital journeys.
