It is 2028 and the airlines booking system works a like a dream: app-based, integrated into your digital calendar, with appropriate alerts making sure your Uber arrives on time.
However, getting the actual aeroplane to where it needs to be relies on old-school technology that is maintained by one 76-year-old, who gets around to it after his post-bowls afternoon nap. What could possibly go wrong?
The rapid digitisation of core business functions demands new IT skills, while legacy systems persist. Can the market keep up?
I spoke to Shane Radford, founder and director of Wazee, which orchestrates skills journeys for Africa's youth to become work-ready and productive, about the challenges and potential solutions of the IT talent landscape, focusing here on IT’s ageing workforce.
How does the industry address the growing workforce gap left by IT professionals with legacy skills reaching retirement age, particularly when entry-level talent lacks the relevant skills?
The tech landscape
The digitisation of core business has reached a tipping point that organisations can no longer ignore. As Radford puts it: “If you’re not digitising for business innovation, you’re unlikely to be playing in the market for much longer.”
According to Gartner research, by 2030, every dollar of GDP created anywhere on the planet will be influenced by artificial intelligence (AI). Moreover, 100% of IT development will incorporate AI in design, development, testing or supporting production.
We need to keep senior talent involved and engaged to enable the transfer of institutional knowledge as well as critical skills.
There is an increase in demand for new IT skills in areas like DevOps, automation, software engineering, data science, cyber security and cloud-first computing. At the same time, there is the legacy skills challenge: up to 60% of many more established businesses’ core functions rely on old technology and systems such as mainframe, RPG and COBOL.
IT talent supply challenges
Globally, the demand for IT talent outstrips supply. In mature or developed markets, the workforce is ageing faster than new entrants are coming in.
In South Africa and the rest of the continent, there is a growing young population. However, local training and education systems are not providing sufficient digital skills to enter the workforce, let alone the skills required for managing legacy systems.
The problem in brief:
- Grow and equip young talent, who are essential to revitalise the workforce.
- Maintain the old systems. Critically, those who have the legacy skills tend to be over 50, which presents a major risk for many of the world’s largest organisations.
- Start the migration from old to new. This can take decades, as legacy systems that are highly complex and integrated need to be reprovisioned.
Contributing factors:
Those who are at or near retirement age are often reluctant to leave for financial reasons, and many experience disillusionment at being forced out of employment. Of course, this can have a knock-on effect when it comes to creating openings for middle-tier IT skills and new entrants lower down.
Another concern is the “thin middle”, caused by the flight of mid-level IT talent. With their expertise in high demand and global remote working on the rise, experienced tech workers are either poached or take up roles where they can earn in overseas currency without having to emigrate.
When it comes to securing the best young talent, a dilemma is to attract graduates who are happy to work on systems or with skills that seem outdated – and which are not currently part of their tertiary curriculum.
The next challenge is that once they join the workforce, new entrants take considerable time to reach full proficiency. There is often a mismatch between the skills acquired in their formal training and the technical requirements of the job, not to mention the behavioural and professional competencies that have yet to be gained through experience.
The costs and ROI of investing in young talent
Graduate talent represents a significant investment to business. Global studies suggest it costs approximately R600 000 over a period of 12 months to source, onboard and transition a new graduate into a productive workforce contributor with real world working experience.
The costs are complex and generally not fully accounted for. In addition to recruitment, training, salary and overhead costs (typically 25% to 30% of salary), their journey to productivity includes redirecting time from senior experts away from revenue-generating work to managing, coaching and mentoring the youth.
This not only adds significantly to the total cost of skilling new entrants, but also results in lost productivity for the business.
On the other hand, there is a strong ROI case for cross-generational teams in that the salary cost of a new entrant versus senior talent is many factors different.
According to OfferZen, a new software developer might earn around a quarter of the salary of a developer with 10+ years’ experience, using average figures. Imagine comparing the cost of work being done by the most senior talent versus new entrants within the legacy systems space.
More importantly, underinvesting in the development of new entrants upfront simply prolongs their time to productivity.
Solutions for bridging the gap
In order to build a sustainable pipeline and address the legacy skills issue, we need to keep senior talent involved and engaged to enable the transfer of institutional knowledge as well as critical skills. Here are some recommended approaches:
As a foundation, organisations must build hybrid workforce models with diverse talent that works together across boundaries, age groups and skills sets. In Radford’s words, it’s about “getting the older people happy to learn new ways, getting the new guys happy to learn old things, and most importantly getting them working and talking together. Nothing happens without collaboration.”
Focus on cultivating professional pathways, not just plugging technical skills gaps. Radford points out that there has been a huge focus on technical skills alongside a demise in professionalism, which is short-sighted. “The tech will change, whereas the professional skills are the core competency that you need to develop.”
AI, for example, has become a core part of operations, but you still need the discipline of software engineering to guide how you source, use and manage data to build and evolve AI models and services. From a recruitment perspective, this might mean positioning a less “sexy” role or job requirement, such as COBOL programming, as part of a broader career journey or portfolio.
Invest in hands-on internship-style programmes which partner junior and senior talent and aim to get new entrants competent and able to self-direct as soon as possible. These programmes should include mentoring and reverse-mentoring, coaching, hands-on management and support of young talent, and providing them with opportunities to gain experience and develop those missing behavioural and professional competencies.
Addressing the challenge of resource allocation
The above suggestion understandably raises concerns about time and resources. With rising pressures and a diminishing workforce, experienced and senior people increasingly don’t have the capacity to be this hands-on – they’re so busy keeping the lights on!
A solution is to utilise a “workforce as a service” model. Rather than relying solely on existing employees, this approach works by “gigging in” experienced experts from outside the organisation.
The Wazee initiative is one such solution. The “Wazees” (Swahili for “elders”) are a network of remote global experts, whose role is to step in and direct, coach and mentor youth, but they can also help to fill other gaps in workforce capacity.
In other words, more than just being a development programme, this is a talent marketplace. Crucially, it is based on a global standardised framework (SFIA) that allows organisations to identify competency gaps (technical and professional) across different levels of responsibility, as well as across industry. Ultimately, this allows the supply and demand of skills to be mapped accurately.
Wazee firstly allows for specific skills gaps to be identified and addressed. Used within an organisation, it can be a platform for the transfer of invaluable institutional know-how. More importantly, it reduces time to productivity for new graduates.
Secondly, it allows senior people to stay economically active, work smarter and potentially even build their own remote teams.
Thirdly, this presents an attractive offer to top young potential hires. They get a solid foundation from which to start and boost their careers, gaining globally-verified professional skills that make them marketable both locally and internationally.
Nurturing cross-generational leadership
One key ingredient to getting new grads fully up to speed is to develop skills that support autonomy, initiative and self-leadership. This is particularly important when the focus of IT work is shifting to getting things done through AI. In a previous article, I made the point that everyone, including individual contributors, needs to become something of a manager.
But this is also an opportunity to reinvigorate experienced talent by helping them develop their own leadership capabilities. It’s often acknowledged that many technical experts make terrible managers.
However, as they shift from being specialist workers and producers to coaching the future generation of IT talent, senior experts can revitalise their own careers as well as create a legacy.
When it comes to addressing talent challenges, the “winning formula” is a combination of cross-generational mentorship with leadership-of-self and others.
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