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What’s causing your workforce’s tech skills gaps?
6 min read | Harry Gooding | Article | Leadership | General
Skills shortages continue to hamper the tech industry, with the overwhelming majority (93%) of employers having contended with them over the past year. By now, you’re probably all too aware of the negative impacts of skills gaps, with productivity, employee morale and the ability to deliver projects cited by employers as the top three detriments, according to our 2025 Salary and Recruiting Trends Guide. However, understanding the root causes of these issues can be a more difficult feat.
If you’re currently in the same predicament, you may be feeling unsure of where to begin with overcoming these challenges – or wondering if you can even overcome them at all. As we sail through turbulent economic waters, closing your workforce’s tech skills gaps may seem an impossible pursuit.
At Skills and Learning, we’re in the business of solving employers’ skills shortages, so here we’ll explore just some of the reasons that could be behind your team’s tech skills gaps, and how you can overcome them. For personalised and more comprehensive recommendations, you can take our Tech Skills MOT for Your Workforce assessment – this handy tool allows you to evaluate your current capabilities and advises what steps you can take to get to where you want to be.
The fierce competition for skilled tech professionals means that top candidates are often snapped up very quickly after beginning their job search. Slow hiring processes can result in applicants dropping out as they receive offers elsewhere from faster competitors, impacting your organisation’s ability to secure the best talent. In contrast, quick hiring processes will reduce the risk of candidate drop-off and help you build a sustainable pipeline of engaged candidates.
You can speed up your hiring processes in a number of ways, such as reducing the time-gap between applications and interview requests. Decreasing the number of interview stages that prospective applicants need to go through could also be a simple way to cut down lengthy processes. If you deem all current stages to be necessary, then why not consider merging two stages together and having the interviews back-to-back, if possible? Finally, you should aim to make a decision quickly after the final-stage interviews have concluded, as indecisiveness about which candidate to offer the position to may mean you risk candidates accepting offers elsewhere.
If you’re not prioritising learning and development, you could be harming team culture, staff retention and your long-term workforce capabilities. Upskilling is crucial for plugging skills gaps, so failing to do so could be one of the main causes of your challenges.
Even if your budget for learning and development is limited, it's crucial to develop a robust and cost-effective strategy. This will ensure that your investment in skills development, along with the resulting skills and capabilities, aligns with your organisation’s strategic goals in both the short- and long-term. This can be achieved through various approaches, such as leveraging your existing workforce, exploring low-cost initiatives, and considering the advantages of becoming a skills-based organisation, where you hire individuals for their strong learning potential.
Given the rapidly advancing nature of the tech industry, with advancements like AI seeing significant uptake in recent years, the most sought-after technical skills are ever-changing. As a result, tech employers may find their long-term capabilities are more sustainable if they hire based on learning potential, as opposed to solely on existing experience or qualifications. If you haven’t yet considered this hiring approach, you could be falling behind the competition, with more than three quarters (77%) of tech employers saying they’re open to hiring someone who does not possess all the required skills with the intention of upskilling them, according to our findings.
If you decide to go down this route, it’s important to understand how employees want their employers to support them with upskilling. Tech employees say their most important requirements are that their employer invests in their training (54%) and allows them time during working hours to complete training (53%) and attend relevant conferences or talks (41%).
Remember, when it comes to solving your tech skills gaps, solely relying on quick-fix solutions won’t be sustainable in the long-term. By getting to the root causes of your issues, and taking action to address these, you can begin to fix your problems at the source. So don’t just accept skills shortages as the norm. At Skills and Learning, we have proven that there are ways to overcome these challenges without breaking the bank. Together, we can close your tech skills gaps and help you work towards a more productive and innovative workforce.
Want to find out other factors that could be behind your workforce’s tech skills gaps? Take our Tech Skills MOT for Your Workforce assessment for expert insights and tailored recommendations – it takes just ten minutes and it’s completely free!
Harry Gooding, Director, Hays Skills & Learning
Harry is part of Hays Skills & Learning, a new business in the Hays portfolio, supporting our customer network to develop skills development programmes that open up employment opportunities to ‘undiscovered talent’ communities. After beginning his career in recruitment, he then worked in VC backed start-ups and scale-ups for six years across two different portfolios before joining Hays.
