Tech Adoption Trends and the Demand for Talent in 2023

By FOSSlife Team, 17 May, 2023

Despite the latest round of layoffs and other spending cuts, recent reports indicate that tech skills are still in demand.

The Linux Foundation’s recent 2023 State of Tech Talent Report, which focused on acquiring and retaining talent, states that “the demand for skilled tech talent remains strong,” with companies looking to hire particularly in the areas of cloud, cybersecurity, and AI/ML.

“We’ve seen a lot of layoffs and cost-cutting, and I don’t know if it’s that open source is counter-cyclical to these kinds of things, but around the Linux Foundation, and just in the communities that I talk with day in and day out, we’re seeing a reverse trend,” said Jim Zemlin, at the recent Open Source Summit in Vancouver.

Skills Needed

According to the report, “a high volume of organizations are looking to add technical staff” in the following areas:

Cloud/container technologies (50%)
Cybersecurity (50%)
AI/ML (46%)
Database and data management (37%)
Advanced analytics and data science (37%)

In the past two years, says the report, cybersecurity has become increasingly important for organizations. “Cybersecurity was ranked #2 in 2022 and is projected to be ranked #1 in 2023 based on organizational plans to increase and decrease staff. Cybersecurity will therefore emerge as an important area for adding technical staff and a correspondingly marginal number of staff reductions.”

Other takeaways:

Both cloud and managed service providers (65%) and telecommunications organizations (65%) are more likely to increase their technical staff in 2023.
New hiring continues to focus on developers and newer technologies, while senior technical roles bear the brunt of job cuts (45%).
Most respondents agree that certification (73%) and pre-employment testing (81%) are necessary to verify candidates’ skills.

“Training and upskilling are essential strategies for organizations looking to address the changing hiring landscape,” the report states. Specifically:

Seventy percent of organizations surveyed provide training opportunities for their existing staff on new technologies.
Fifty-eight percent of organizations train existing employees more often than hiring consultants (38%) when unable to find suitable candidates.

Global Tech Adoption Trends

The 2023 Future of Jobs Report from the World Economic Forum also cited technology adoption as a key driver of business transformation in the next five years.

According to the survey results, more than 75 percent of companies are likely or highly likely to adopt the following technologies in the next five years:

Digital platforms and apps (86.5%)
Education and workforce development technologies (80.9%)
Big data analytics (80.0%)
IoT and connect devices (76.8%)
Cloud computing (76.6%)
Encryption and cybersecurity (75.6%)

The report, which is based on data from 803 companies — collectively employing more than 11.3 million workers — across 27 industry clusters around the world, notes that the fastest-growing job roles “are driven by technology, digitalization and sustainability.”