10 most difficult-to-fill IT roles — and how to address the gap

For many IT leaders, hiring and retention has become somewhat easier of late.

Niel Nickolaisen, for one, has seen bright spots in the IT talent market. “When we post a job,” says the director of enterprise systems and security at Utah State University, “we get more and better candidates than we have for several years, and I have less churn with my current staff.”

But for critical, high-demand roles, talent remains tight. As Avnet CIO Max Chan says, “Everyone is looking for very similar skills in the people they would like to bring on board.”

The net result, as Nickolaisen states: “There are just not yet enough nerds in the world. We’re creating more jobs than the market is supplying.”

Today’s most difficult-to-fill roles reflect the rapidly changing nature of enterprise IT. According to Foundry/CIO.com’s 2024 State of the CIO Survey, accelerating interest in AI has pushed artificial intelligence atop the list of hardest IT hires for the first time, followed by 2023’s No. 1 and No. 2 roles, cybersecurity and data science/analytics.

Foundry / CIO.com

And it’s the pressure to digitally transform that “is further increasing the demand for AI, cybersecurity, and data science and analytics skills,” says Chan. “Truly skilled technologists in these areas are limited, and those who can really deliver what businesses require are coming from an even smaller pool.”

Aamir Khan, senior analyst at Everest Group, agrees that, while overall demand patterns for IT talent “are expected to remain subdued, niche skills such as AI, data science, and cybersecurity will continue to present challenges for tech leaders worldwide.”

Even layoffs among leading tech companies haven’t eased the strain. Moreover, CIOs are competing in a virtual global talent market today, only to exacerbate the issue. “This flexibility has made it more challenging for companies to attract and retain top talent,” Chan says.

Desperately seeking AI skills

That AI has leapfrogged cybersecurity, which held the top spot as the most difficult-to-fill role for the past four years, speaks volumes, Khan says. “The emergence of generative AI has begun reshaping human capital requirements, necessitating new and niche skills and roles,” he says.

Candidates trained in large language models (LLMs) are getting million-dollar compensation packages, according to the Wall Street Journal, with some companies poaching entire engineering teams to onboard AI talent en masse.

Thanks to their user-friendly interfaces, generative AI and LLMs are attracting avid interest at Avnet, which has been leveraging AI and machine learning for more than five years.

“This shift has opened opportunities for us to solve business problems that were previously out of reach,” Chan says. “For example, in the engineering space, a few engineers could take days to come up with a new design, while generative AI is able to create five or more alternatives in minutes.”

Still, most IT shops haven’t been conducting much machine learning or natural language processing in-house previously. “Then suddenly, with genAI, most of us had to do AI work,” Utah State’s Nickolaisen says.

When data analytics emerged more than a decade ago, its gradual ramp up allowed IT leaders to develop and acquire skills over time. Moreover, tech tools advanced apace to the point that most CIOs didn’t have to hire PhDs to do the work. By contrast, “it feels like over a single weekend, genAI was there and we needed to learn and experiment and start using it by the middle of the next week,” Nickolaisen says. “The world has not yet had to time to build training programs and scale them. Even worse, the situation is also changing rapidly, so the initial skills we need might be different from what we need in just a few months.”

Enterprises who identified genAI use cases in 2023 are now finding experienced professionals in short supply. Their answer? Upskilling, says Everest Group’s Khan. “Investment in career development initiatives underscores the importance of continuous learning to adapt to the evolving landscape of AI,” he says.

For now, many CIOs are looking to third parties for help. Dennis Hodges, CIO at global automotive supplier Inteva Products, is using consultants and looking for off-the-shelf systems because AI is a new area for the company.

Scott duFour, global CIO for Corpay, is taking a similar approach. “[AI] is still just a nascent part of our business, so until we have successful use cases, it doesn’t make sense to hire a bunch of full-time employees in that area,” duFour says. “For now, we’ll count on contractors and third-party vendors for most of our AI needs.”

Perennial shortfalls in cybersecurity and data science

Cybersecurity will always be a high priority, but AI has only magnified the threat. “Companies must continue to invest as bad actors become more creative,” says Avnet’s Chan. “More and more, we are seeing [bad actors] leveraging AI-like deep fake technology to scam users or employees. Staying vigilant is crucial.”

With cybersecurity talent scarce, many IT leaders are investing in technology as a force multiplier. “Cybersecurity, while critical, is an area that we can get good tools for now as long as we are willing to empty our wallet,” says Inteva’s Hodges, for whom data analytics presents the biggest hiring challenge — particularly data miners.

“I’m referring to people who understand what the data means and the relationships in the data,” Hodges says. “This requires experience with our data and the structures we employ. These are not easy people to find.”

Hodges has had the best results training process-minded business professionals from finance, supply chain management, or HR in the use of data analytics tools.  

Enterprise architecture and legacy tech still in demand

As companies seek to modernize and support day-to-day operations, demand for legacy IT skills and enterprise architects remains robust.

“Legacy technology — usually enterprise applications such as ERP — are responsible for running the business. There is no way that companies can give up on these applications immediately,” says Avnet’s Chan.

For those IT leaders looking to modernize these systems, it takes a long time to upgrade or migrate to cloud-native architectures. Until then, legacy tech skills will continue to play an important role, Chan says.

But for some organizations, AI is hastening the need to revamp operations. In the past, an organization might get by with a highly-customized ERP, monolithic architecture, and decades-old code base; but no more. “They are too much of a drag on our agility,” says Utah State’s Nickolaisen. “The rise of AI has accelerated the need to look at and possibly replace legacy technologies.”

Additional gaps to mind

DevOps and agile skills are also proving more difficult to come by of late, having surged into the top 10. Such experience, however, can be built, says Nickolaisen, who is also co-author of The Agile Culture: Leading Through Trust and Ownership.

“As organizations and teams learn about and use DevOps and Agile, more people will gain experience and the problem will resolve itself, but that will take some time,” he says. “After that we will deal with the same issue with whatever comes after DevOps and Agile.”

Meanwhile, the recent rise in regulations has compliance talent harder to find as well. Whereas previously organizations might have prepared for one or two regulations, a full slate of data, privacy, and AI regulations emerging on a local, national, and international level has many IT organizations scrambling.

“The challenge is the diversity of the compliance regulations and keeping up with the changes,” Nickolaisen says. “We end up having to dedicate people just to keep current on the craziness.”

On the flip side, cloud skills are becoming less of an issue in the overall IT mix than in the recent past, in part because organizations’ cloud strategies are maturing after the past few years’ push.

“Since we’ve gone to the cloud, we are more easily able to get skills for our basic infrastructure,” Inteva’s Hodges says.

Nikolaisen, whose university has moved from on-premises to private cloud to public multicloud and edge computing, agrees, noting that Utah State’s cloud journey has also shifted his talent needs.

“I believe we have accepted that we will operate in a hybrid environment,” he says, “and so the required disciplines and skills are orchestration rather than specific cloud or on-prem skills.”

Meanwhile, RPA and — more notably — application development have dropped from the State of the CIO’s top 10 list, something that would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago.

“With the availability of low-code/no-code applications, there is very little need for us to continue building custom applications,” Avnet’s Chan says. “A single developer can do much of that work with generative AI.”

Filling the gap: Approaches that work

For CIOs challenged to fill these roles, here are some best practices and advice.

Embrace on-the-job training. This approach works for existing employees and new recruits.“When Microsoft introduced Azure open-source stack, we engaged our team on projects to give them real-world experience on real use cases from the business,” says Avnet’s Chan. “That is how we’re expanding our resource pool of experience and it has proven successful.” Chan also enlists strategic partners to lead development programs to ensure Avnet employees have access to the latest industry skills.

Go to the source. Nickolaisen likes to build relationships with technical training providers, including colleges, certification programs, and high schools. “[They’re] always looking for partnerships that offer internships, apprenticeships, job shadowing, and the like,” he says. “If I can place myself in their pipeline, I get an early look at the best talent and also serve the broader community.” Nickolaisen says his team enjoys mentoring the students, and even when the efforts don’t result in a hire, “they always remember what we did for them and word spreads that we are a great place to be.”

Make job rotation the norm. Avnet’s Chan took a page from traditional management training programs for his IT talent strategy: “Anyone coming to work in our group can rotate from data analytics to DevOps to machine learning,” he says. “The breadth of experience they receive allows them to decide what they want to specialize in, not just work in desktop support or the help desk.”

Open up IT training. OnceNickolaisen learned that some Utah State non-IT staff were pursuing technical training on their own, he started conducting internal IT job fairs and offering job shadowing to those outside IT. “We did not get a sudden wave of candidates, but it supplemented our hiring plans with people who already knew our business and were familiar as users of our technologies,” he says.

Join user groups. Want to find someone passionate about cybersecurity or genAI? User groups are a great place to look. “People who participate in user groups are passionate about their craft — just the people we want to hire,” Nickolaisen says. “By being active in user groups, we get to know them and they get to know us.” What’s more each user group member has their own extended network. “Pretty soon a pretty large pool of people know what we are doing, know about our culture, and know us,” he says.

Market actively. “It’s unfair and unrealistic to expect HR to successfully find new IT talent without our help,” says Corpay’s duFour, whose IT leaders play an active role in recruitment by being involved in industry organizations, speaking at conferences, writing articles, and being visible faces and voices for the company. “I’ve personally had new hires tell me that an article I wrote or a podcast I was on gave them a better understanding of company and our IT organization as they consider taking the job,” duFour says.

Focus on culture. Competing head-to-head with tech giants will always be challenging, but culture can have an influence. “We find that candidates are drawn to Corpay because IT actually drives sales, revenue, and profit for a company that generates double-digit growth annually. [That] really excites potential employees,” says duFour, noting that attrition has been stable for more than a year. “We’ll always have IT roles that need to be filled, but having a core team with little turnover helps us temper any hiring urgency or anxiety.”