SCC and HPE: Enhance Specialised Skills

The Tech Talent Shortage

The shortage of skilled IT talent is being felt in businesses and public-sector organisations all over the world. Gartner research has found that as many as half of all tech vacancies go unfilled for at least six months, and that skills gap severely impacts organisations’ ability to innovate and pursue digital transformation. And according to Salesforce, a lack of specialist skills is holding back AI implementation for 60% of public-sector IT professionals.

Not every organisation has the capability or budget to resolve the issue by hiring top talent at inflated salaries: Gartner has also found that 86% of CIOs believe competition for qualified candidates is getting stronger. So a new approach must be explored.

A challenge driven by several factors

Addressing the tech talent shortage can be especially complicated as there are a wide range of reasons behind it:

• Talent churn: the best employees around are working their way up the career ladder and moving into more senior positions quickly, meaning that IT staff turnover can be very high.
• Lack of new talent: many experienced ‘baby boomer’ IT staff are reaching retirement age, and they aren’t being replaced by enough skilled younger employees. This lack of upcoming tech talent may be due to the misconception that innovations like AI will eradicate most IT jobs in the future.
• Generalised skills: large numbers of IT staff have become ‘infrastructure generalists’ who focus on management and don’t get the opportunity to learn specialist skills.
• Lack of ability to adopt new tech: the burden of day-to-day IT operations leaves little time or resource to learn new skills, or embrace innovations like AI and automation. This means that many organisations lack the crucial team members that can drive the enterprise forward and through transformation.
• Evolving skill requirements: new technologies and new ways of working means IT skill demands are changing, especially in areas such as machine learning, programming, reliability engineering, and DevOps.

A complex problem with a multi-faceted solution

SCC and HPE believe that there are three main areas which, when addressed collectively, can help organisations navigate past the challenges of the tech talent shortage:

• Breaking down talent barriers: casting a wider net in hiring strategy and simplifying operations to maximise existing talent can help ease the path to better skill acquisition. This can be enabled through flexible working models that open up talent pools worldwide, and cloud management tools that connect skilled staff to apps, data, edges, colocations and data centres, anywhere and at any time.
  
• Freeing up in-house expertise: automation and technology can relieve the burden of day-to-day admin from the existing IT team, and free up their capacity to upskill and add strategic value elsewhere. Modern tooling and artificial intelligence can be applied to a range of different tasks, such as resetting user passwords, profiling new divides joining the network, provisioning new devices, patching and platform administration.
  
• Updating technology: replacing outdated legacy solutions with modern, capable alternatives can drive a virtuous circle of improving productivity, enabling upskilling and digital transformation, boosting overall IT performance, and supporting better talent retention and acquisition in the long term.

A winning combination of edge-to-cloud management and expert support

SCC and HPE have been successful partners for more than 30 years, and have come together with an end-to-end, holistic strategy and solutions package that embraces the three-pronged approach. It’s based around the market-leading GreenLake edge-to-cloud management platform (GLCP), which can give your IT team:

• Full network visibility and observability: see all network, storage and compute devices, along with cloud accounts (such as AWS and Azure), from a single pane of glass for efficient and time-saving observation and management. This means organisations can utilise their existing tech skills more effectively and lessens the urgent need for acquisition.

• Standardisation and automation: hand repetitive tasks over to automated tools, freeing up more staff time, reducing the need for specialist skills, and removing silos and duplication through better integration.

• Efficient hybrid environment: an environment designed for maximum uptime, along with AI tooling to predict faults and enable proactive remediation, can prevent IT staff from losing valuable time to fixing problems reactively.

• A platform to drive business value: GLCP provides the foundation of a self-service hybrid cloud, and enables generalist IT staff to get more involved in multi-discipline IT operations and drive transformation and innovation internally.

Navigate the Tech Talent Shortage with Expertise and Technology

This solution is backed up by SCC’s cloud expertise and management capabilities. The SCC Cloud+ offering is powered by more than 300 HPE racks in our UK-based data centres, and SCC is HPE’s third-largest Platinum Partner in the EMEA region. SCC can install, configure and integrate your solution on-site, conduct any migration services required, and deliver ongoing support around hardware break/fix and helpdesk services. 

The SCC and HPE partnership is here to bring your organisation back to health and set you on a path for future smooth operations – whether that be through implementing tooling that allows organisations to take back control of technical debt, or fully managing a part of the IT team to alleviate strain on the business. So, if you need help running your cloud platform in the long-term, or simply want to drive efficiencies to do more with less, SCC and HPE are the best choice for navigating the tech talent shortage successfully.

Get support that works for you

Contact the SCC team today and find out how SCC and HPE can tailor solutions that address your specific gaps in tech talent.