The top five tech skills you should be hiring for, right now

Tech­nol­o­gy pro­vides busi­ness­es of all shapes and sizes with the tools they need to dri­ve growth and inno­va­tion. And that’s nev­er more impor­tant than in times of tur­bu­lence and eco­nom­ic uncer­tain­ty. 

No mat­ter what the wider eco­nom­ic out­look, busi­ness­es that are able to quick­ly iden­ti­fy and reac­tive­ly or proac­tive­ly meet chang­ing cus­tomer wants, needs and pri­or­i­ties will always pros­per. 

The tech­nol­o­gy land­scape is con­stant­ly evolv­ing. This means it’s essen­tial to take a high-lev­el, strate­gic approach to putting the right skills in place, across the work­force. By doing this, busi­ness lead­ers ensure their organ­i­sa­tions are ready to lever­age the tools, plat­forms and trends that will help them to tack­le their pri­or­i­ties – with­out being side-tracked by those that are just like­ly to be a dis­trac­tion.

So, here are the five areas where I feel busi­ness­es need to focus their ener­gy when it comes to devel­op­ing key skills. Whether you’re a one-per­son show offer­ing pro­fes­sion­al or free­lance ser­vices, or part of a glob­al enter­prise with thou­sands of employ­ees, skills in these fields will help you do busi­ness more effi­cient­ly, safe­ly and prof­itably. 

1. Artificial intelligence

With­out doubt, AI is the hot top­ic of the day when it comes to busi­ness tech­nol­o­gy. Devel­op­ing skills in AI doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to be about learn­ing advanced com­put­er sci­ence and how to cre­ate machine-learn­ing algo­rithms from scratch. More prac­ti­cal­ly, it’s about under­stand­ing how to fit the pletho­ra of tools and plat­forms that are becom­ing increas­ing­ly avail­able, afford­able and usable every day, to the needs of your busi­ness.

By now, most peo­ple read­ing this have prob­a­bly heard of, and used, Chat­G­PT, or the new, AI-enabled ver­sion of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. You may even have dab­bled with tools like Dall‑E 2 or Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion to see what all the fuss around AI-gen­er­at­ed art is about.

But this is just the tip of the ice­berg. There are lit­er­al­ly hun­dreds of AI-infused tools and plat­forms becom­ing avail­able, designed to auto­mate and speed up leisure or busi­ness activ­i­ties from book­keep­ing to social media man­age­ment, prospect­ing for leads, cre­at­ing text, videos and sound­tracks, or man­ag­ing any kind of project. 

More than devel­op­ing advanced pro­gram­ming, maths and sta­tis­ti­cal skills, build­ing AI capa­bil­i­ties into an organ­i­sa­tion today is about iden­ti­fy­ing what sort of tasks can ben­e­fit from being auto­mat­ed and del­e­gat­ed to AI, and then find­ing the right appli­ca­tions and tools to get it done. It’s also about being able to under­stand and pre­dict the way AI will impact your line of busi­ness in the future, so when even more sophis­ti­cat­ed and pow­er­ful tools inevitably become avail­able, you’ll be the first to put them to work and reap the rewards. 

2. Data analysis

Most busi­ness­es don’t know how to use even a frac­tion of the data that they gen­er­ate or have access to through exter­nal sources. Those that do can use it to dri­ve effi­cien­cy, bet­ter under­stand their mar­kets and com­pe­ti­tion, and devel­op prod­ucts and ser­vices that are more in-line with their cus­tomers’ needs. 

As with AI – and this is par­tic­u­lar­ly true if you are a small­er organ­i­sa­tion – these days it doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to mean devel­op­ing the hard­core tech­ni­cal skills that you would have need­ed if you’d want­ed to car­ry out ana­lyt­ics 20 years ago.

Today, you can find myr­i­ad tools with friend­ly user-inter­faces that will help you analyse your data. All you need to do is access the data you already have to under­stand, for exam­ple, what demo­graph­ics your prod­ucts and ser­vices are pop­u­lar with, what price points your cus­tomers are com­fort­able with, how your cus­tomer ser­vice per­for­mance impacts your cus­tomer churn, and how faults, break­ages and wastage affects your bot­tom line. 

3. Cybersecurity

It’s a sad but inescapable fact that as tech­nol­o­gy enables us to do new and amaz­ing things, it also makes us vul­ner­a­ble to new threats. The cost of cyber­crime to busi­ness­es will be $8tn in 2023 and is expect­ed to grow to £10.5t by 2025. Much of this is down to costs incurred when data is stolen – esti­mat­ed at around $500 per stolen record, with the most dam­ag­ing cyber thefts see­ing fraud­sters make off with mil­lions of records. 

Once again, there is a com­mon mis­con­cep­tion here – that imple­ment­ing cyber­se­cu­ri­ty skills will involve hir­ing elite experts who will sit in a dark­ened room, scan­ning mon­i­tors for thieves attempt­ing to breach your fire­wall. In fact, the most impor­tant cyber­se­cu­ri­ty skills are those that can be taught rel­a­tive­ly cheap­ly to any­one. These include safe pass­word man­age­ment prac­tices, avoid­ance of mal­ware, and aware­ness of phish­ing and social engi­neer­ing attacks designed to trick employ­ees into giv­ing up access or let­ting attack­ers in. 

For small­er organ­i­sa­tions, this enhanced lev­el of aware­ness plus com­pe­tence with the wide range of exist­ing, off-the-shelf secu­ri­ty solu­tions are crit­i­cal ele­ments of a basic cyber­se­cu­ri­ty strat­e­gy. Larg­er organ­i­sa­tions have to think about imple­ment­ing poli­cies through­out an organ­i­sa­tion, from top to bot­tom, as well as imple­ment­ing poli­cies to keep devices secure when work­ers are remote, or access­ing com­pa­ny assets via their own devices. 

4. User and customer experience

We know that cus­tomers are increas­ing­ly plac­ing impor­tance on the expe­ri­ence of choos­ing, buy­ing and using prod­ucts and ser­vices – to the point where it has greater influ­ence over what they buy than price or qual­i­ty does. After all, things we buy are increas­ing­ly sub­scrip­tion-based – where our choic­es can be can­celled and re-thought if we aren’t hap­py with them or don’t feel we are get­ting good val­ue. And prod­ucts are increas­ing­ly dis­pos­able and replace­able. But expe­ri­ence is an issue every time we inter­act with a busi­ness or use what we have bought – so good ones are price­less.

The cus­tomer expe­ri­ence agent is an increas­ing­ly impor­tant play­er in many types of busi­ness. It’s their job to think about the entire cus­tomer jour­ney across every touch­point. Where are the fric­tions and small, nig­gling drops in expe­ri­ence qual­i­ty that could even­tu­al­ly add up to caus­ing the loss of a cus­tomer? And how can tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions help us to over­come these prob­lems? This cov­ers the spe­cif­ic tech­nol­o­gy dis­ci­plines of user inter­face (UI) and user expe­ri­ence (UX) design – ensur­ing the prod­ucts and ser­vices that your cus­tomers use are designed to be as friend­ly and intu­itive as pos­si­ble.

5. Cloud platforms

Most of the skills we’ve men­tioned pre­vi­ous­ly in this arti­cle can be sup­plied direct­ly to your busi­ness­es via on-demand, pay-as-you-go cloud plat­forms. Cloud plat­forms can also host the tools and appli­ca­tions we need inter­nal­ly to run our busi­ness process­es (think col­lab­o­ra­tive plat­forms like Teams or Slack).

And they can also be used to deliv­er your ser­vices direct­ly to your cus­tomers. For most busi­ness­es that don’t have mil­lions to spend on infra­struc­ture and the abil­i­ty to attract unlim­it­ed amounts of world-class tal­ent, the cloud will be the gate­way to lever­ag­ing AI and machine learn­ing, and putting ser­vices togeth­er to make it pos­si­ble will be a vital skill.  

This means that exper­tise in cloud plat­forms, infra­struc­ture, archi­tec­ture and engi­neer­ing will con­tin­ue to be high­ly valu­able for busi­ness­es of all sizes dur­ing 2023. New­er par­a­digms and mod­els of cloud com­put­ing – such as hybrid-cloud, mul­ti-cloud and super-cloud will con­tin­ue to rede­fine what is pos­si­ble, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly becom­ing more user-friend­ly and acces­si­ble to more busi­ness­es. 

Technology provides businesses of all shapes and sizes with the tools they need to drive growth and innovation. And that’s never more important than in times of turbulence and economic uncertainty. 

No matter what the wider economic outlook, businesses that are able to quickly identify and reactively or proactively meet changing customer wants, needs and priorities will always prosper. 

The technology landscape is constantly evolving. This means it’s essential to take a high-level, strategic approach to putting the right skills in place, across the workforce. By doing this, business leaders ensure their organisations are ready to leverage the tools, platforms and trends that will help them to tackle their priorities – without being side-tracked by those that are just likely to be a distraction.