Mind the Digital Skills Gap: Overcoming Developer Shortage

A recent survey conducted by the British Chambers of Commerce revealed that three quarters of businesses are facing a shortage of digital skills. Failure to tackle these scarcities poses a major risk to company productivity, and could impact business’ bottom line.

It isn’t just UK enterprises facing the challenges of digital skill shortages – our Australian office has also struggled to find suitable candidates with the right skills and at a reasonable price.

There is arguably a widespread perception about the lack of primed and ready developers in the marketplace. But questions have been raised over whether the developer shortage crisis is a myth, exacerbated by organisations that aren’t looking in the right places to find and attract the talent they need. To that end, there is plenty that businesses can do in order to tackle the digital skills shortages they face.

Bridging the Gap

In order to find the right talent, organisations must have a clear understanding of what they are looking for. There’s a vast amount of tech innovation that organisations are struggling to keep up with, but this is only half the story; retaining good developers is just as important as hiring them.

Organisations need to make their offer attractive in order to retain the best developers. Not just in terms of salary and other monetary incentives, but also by offering a positive work environment. Once a business has a team of developers, it should use them to the fullest. Providing ongoing training in learning new technologies is critical as it expands their skills set and gives them new technical challenges, which developers love.  Regular opportunities for progression is beneficial for both the company and the employees.

The key to keeping up with the digital skills shortage is to find a balance between the way organisations are set up to attract and retain developers with the required skills and what these new recruits want from their employer.

PretaGov Recruitment Drive

Like many other technically-advanced organisations, we are faced with the reality of finding Python developers that possess the right technical ability and industry know-how; Python being a high-level programming language used widely in web development and analytics, designed to be an easy to learn, high-performance language.

These highly-skilled individuals are vital to our business to ensure we can continue to create products that drive innovation in the public sector. We are always on the lookout for new talent, so if you possess Python and are interested in working on the next phase of digital transformation, contact us at jobs@pretagov.com.