The majority of Chief Information Officers (CIO) are planning to expand their full-time workforce as they look to support new digital initiatives. This is according to a new report from Gartner, based on a poll of 184 CIOs in North America, EMEA and APAC.
Throughout 2021, 55 percent of CIOs will look to add personnel to their teams that can support projects surrounding automation, cloud and analytics, and remote work support.
“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 VP at Gartner. “The initial pessimism around the 2021 talent situation that many CIOs expressed mid-2020 has since dwindled.”
The desire to speed up digital transformation projects is the number one motivation in most cases, followed by operations automation and an increase in cloud adoption, Gartner further explains.
To that end, most CIOs will be looking to add additional personnel in emerging technology domains, security, analytics and cloud. Datacenter, network, system administration, and applications maintenance are where most organizations are expected to shrink their workforce, as they pivot into cloud technologies.
Charlet also added that most CIOs will probably struggle to find enough skilled employees to meet their organization’s demands, particularly as consumer and employee expectations change. To solve this problem, they will probably need to turn towards upskilling and refocusing their existing teams.
