The tech industry has always been a bellwether of progress and with it, the ability of governments, educators and recruiters to keep pace with its changing demands. It’s interesting to remember the days when tech jobs were being decimated. Twenty years ago, Silicon Valley was laying off high tech workers in their thousands. This wasn’t a declining industry. As Wired reported at the time, this was a changing industry, one that had contended with a dotcom boom and bust period and was re-emerging into a decade that would see companies such as Skype, Facebook, Spotify and YouTube launch. The tech industry was not in crisis but in a constant state of flux, re-inventing and demanding new skills to enable innovation.
The best way to think about that is to consider the jobs that didn’t really exist in the early 2000s. Front end developers, UX designers, BI developers, cloud architects, data scientists; all have become specialist areas of work, where skills have evolved rapidly and demanded on-going learning. According to research by Gartner, 29% of the skills that were present in an average job posting in 2018 will be obsolete this year. So, we have a market, where demand for skills is growing and evolving rapidly and seemingly, a smaller pool of relevant candidates with the required skills to do those jobs.
