A majority of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are planning to increase the total number of full-time employees in IT to accelerate digital initiatives in 2021, according to a recent survey from Gartner, Inc.
As per the survey, 55 per cent of CIOs plan to increase their total number of full-time employees (FTEs) in IT across the course of 2021. The staffing growth will be predominantly focused on the areas of automation, cloud and analytics platforms, and support for remote work.
“The critical role IT played across most firms’ response to the pandemic appears to have had a positive impact on IT staffing plans,” said Matthew Charlet, research vice president at Gartner. “The initial pessimism around the 2021 talent situation that many CIOs expressed mid-2020 has since dwindled.”
The primary factor driving IT talent strategies in 2021 is the need to speed up digital initiatives, followed by the automation of business operations and an increase in cloud adoption.
Overall, CIOs are much more likely to increase the number of full-time employees in newer, more-emerging technology domains, as per the report.
“Growth in security personnel is necessary to reduce the risks from significant investments in remote work, analytics, and cloud platforms. Datacenter, network, systems administration and applications maintenance are the most likely areas to see staffing decreases due to the shift towards cloud services,” the report said.
As per the survey, 74 per cent of CIOs are planning to increase staffing by at least 2 per cent in security operations, followed by Analytics platforms (73 per cent) and Business Workflows (71 per cent).
“While CIOs plan to hire more staff in several areas critical to meeting changed consumer and employee expectations, most will not be able to meet their planned talent strategy goals without also upskilling or refocusing their existing teams,” said Charlet.
The findings are from the 2021 Gartner CIO Talent Planning Survey conducted between November 2020 and December 2020 among 184 CIOs in North America, EMEA ( Europe, the Middle East and Africa) and the Asia Pacific across industries, functions and company sizes.