IT Talent Shortage: 76% of Employers Struggling to Find Workers

The results of the Employment Expectations Survey, prepared by ManpowerGroup, for the second quarter of this year and carried out among 5,728 employers around the world, including Colombia, showed that 76% of information technology (IT) employers struggle to find the talent they need.

(Read: Shortage of IT talent in Colombia, a business challenge).

This disturbing reality is further complicated when in the same Survey IT employers reported that they have a Net Employment Expectation (NEO) of 34% for the second quarter of 2024.

In Colombia, specificallythis figure is even more alarming since employers anticipated a moderate employment expectation (18%), decreasing 12 percentage points compared to the previous quarter.

(See: 'In Colombia there is great potential to generate IT talent').

“We found a disturbing and challenging panorama. While there is great difficulty in finding suitable and talented IT professionals, there is also a decreasing employment expectation. In Colombia, for example, in just three months we went from 30% to 18%; In addition, it also decreased by 9% compared to the same period last year,” said Ricardo Morales, general director of Experis, a ManpowerGroup brand that specializes in talent specialized in IT and technology solutions.

This spectrum is further corroborated in ManpowerGroup's 2024 Talent Shortage Study, which confirms that when it comes to skills, IT and data skills are the hardest to find, regardless of industry and geography; For this reason, platforms that use AI and machine learning identify the skills and interests of each employee to propose professional promotion plans aligned with their skills while still meeting business objectives.

0other countries in America like Peru (46%), Guatemala (41%), Brazil (36%), Costa Rica (28%) and Mexico (27%) They present much more encouraging figures than those of Colombia (18%) in this period regarding the expectation of IT hiring.

Colombia is well below the world average in IT hiring, all given that employers in this sector reported a global net employment outlook of 34% for the second quarter of 2024.

“The country must intensify IT training so that employers find the necessary talent and, in turn, so that hiring rates in this field improve,” Morales stated.

However, despite this panorama of shortages and hiring expectations, companies also have other challenges and that is to take advantage of technology as an essential element to exercise gender equality.

That is why it is important to highlight that, according to ManpowerGroup Q2 2024 Employment Outlook Study65% of employers, of the more than 500 surveyed in the country, affirm that technology has allowed them to be more flexible, helping them promote gender equality, and 61% affirm that technological advances contribute to equality of genre.

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