Mind the (Skills) Gap

Digital Skills Shortage

Organisations are coming under increasing pressure to focus on learning and training programmes as gaps in the technical skills employees have expanded. 25% of organisations believe that a digital skills shortage is preventing or delaying them from successfully executing a digital transformation strategy. While 81% of CIOs believe they need to recruit new staff to obtain the skills they require.

According to the EU commissioner for the Digital Economy, Maria Gabriel, after 2020 90% of all jobs will require digital skills. It is estimated that 16.5 million people in the UK will need to be ‘upskilled’ in order to become ‘digital workers’.

The pace of change that has been unleashed by digitisation means that success requires the right blend of business, IT and soft skills’ or what we call the ‘harder skills’, so organisations need to align employee skills to their long-term digital strategy accordingly.

At Razor, we are focused on hiring people for their ‘why’, regardless of gender or age. We focus on people’s mindset and passion. Technical skills can be learned, as they always have been, but cultural change requires a more holistic approach. Simply hiring people with technical skills will not enable digital transformation. We believe that people need ‘harder’ skills such as strong leadership and problem-solving, to adapt an organisation to the modern technology world.

The Razor University

That’s why we have created the Razor University, an intensive three-month training plan that is focused on providing individuals who are less experienced with a structured experience-based plan to help accelerate their learning capabilities, so they are ready to step into their chosen careers, whether that be software development or testing.

It’s a programme that is focused on learning through practice and builds on the ‘harder skills’ we recruit for. The programme covers every area of software development and has three major milestones over the course of the three-month period that each teaches a different type of tech from general syntax to Azure, C# and more.

At Razor, we thrive on developing the most appropriate solutions to complex challenges, and always put people at the centre of everything we do. We don’t promise it will be easy, but we promise it will be both challenging and rewarding.

If you’re interested in joining the Razor University programme in the future, keep your eyes on our vacancies or simply get in touch!