UK businesses looking to attract staff to tackle sills shortages in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity are likely to have to increase budgets, re-jig work-life balance offerings and upskill staff.
Almost half (47 per cent) of technology professionals responding to a survey said that work/life balance was significantly more important to them than it was last year, according to a report by TechTarget for the magazine Computer Weekly. In addition, while 49 per cent said that they intended to stay in their current job for the immediate future, the rest were either open to new opportunities or actively looking.
Salaries and skills
The average annual salary for an IT manager is about £71,000, with a director earning about £110,000 per year. Executives can expect to bring in about £235,000 per year. Most commonly (31 per cent), pay increased between 2 and 5 per cent over the past year – with about 30 per cent getting increases of between five and 20 per cent or more.
About a quarter (26 per cent) of respondents said that their organisations suffered skills shortages in artificial intelligence. In fact, the UK has long-term skill shortages in IT skills, according to the UK government. While about two-thirds of British workers are keen to acquire digital skills training, most (93 per cent) said they faced at least one obstacle to doing so, according to research by Amazon Web Services.
Obstacles to upskilling
Out of those, 51 per cent cited a lack of time as an impediment, followed by a lack of financial resources (34 per cent), and knowledge of the skills needed to advance in their careers (32 per cent). In fact, 56 per cent of those who were very interested in additional training reported that their digital skills were self-taught. The most popular (38 per cent) certification to obtain was for cloud security (38 per cent), followed by cybersecurity (32 per cent), according to TechTarget.
