Australia’s unemployment rate is at an almost historic low – 3.5 per cent – and that is affecting every sector and every employer. In the IT industry, this challenge is further compounded with a slow skilled Visa processing window, meaning that there’s no quick relief to vacant job roles.

It also means that existing employees are overburdened, and often asked to complete the work of multiple people. Often, they need to do this without a backup for sick leave or even holidays. This can lead to burnout, and with one-in-five employees considering changing jobs through “the great resignation,” it’s important to understand that offering higher pay is only a temporary solution to the deeper problem.

The solution is to become more strategic and embrace training

Better deploying the IT resources that you do have available to you is essential to meeting this challenge, and this means upskilling staff. This offers two principal benefits back to the business:

  • It helps reduce the reliance on vendors for support contracts. Many organisations end up in a position of inefficiency where they’re passing on tickets from their own customers to a vendor, and this creates a relay effect that is draining on the minimum time the customer has.
  • It helps to empower and engage staff. One of the most effective ways at retaining staff in this job environment has less to do with pay, but rather by ensuring that employees feel like they are empowered and like they’re building their careers by developing skillsets.

This is where training becomes so important. At NovaWorks, we offer support and training services, and work closely with our customers to make sure that the IT team remains focused on more strategic tasks. Skilling your team with the capabilities to deploy and manage a cloud IT environment means they can be empowered to manage the environment once a vendor has completed the initial deployment.

What this looks like in motion

We recently assisted a financial services customer that was looking to migrate an on-premises datacentre to the cloud and have a vendor partner deliver that for them.

We pitched a solution that would involve training the internal staff. We explained that the existing staff will have to support this in a years’ time anyway, and they would need to understand how to work in the cloud once the deployment was completed.

Because of our training programme the customer was able to complete the migration themselves, without additional vendor assistance. This meant that they were able to save money in the long run and have a happier internal team that has been able to add new skillsets and have a meaningful impact on their business.

The skills shortage is not likely to ease in the short or medium term. Instead, companies should shift their focus to engaging with existing employees and developing skills in-house. At NovaWorks, we can help you strategically plan for that – contact us today for more information.