Where are the Developers? The hunt for IT professionals

Finding qualified professionals is not an easy task. And it gets even more complicated when it comes to Information Technology (IT) specialists.

In Brazil, after several movements in the market during the pandemic period, a silo was generated between the high demands and the low quantity of professionals trained to meet them, even more after the globalization movement of these specialists.

Many factors were triggers for this movement, but I take the liberty of saying that one of the main ones has been the advent of new technologies that complement and further boost cloud computing, such as 5G and Open Banking, responsible for major movements in market strategies.

In this article I provide my perception of the current market situation and the reasons that have made the competition for specialized professionals even more intense.

The sea is for fish, but... where are the fish?

According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), Brazil registered 14.8 million unemployed in 2021. On the other hand, the technology area had a growth of 178% in the number of vacancies, and here we realize that: there are vacancies, but there is a lack of trained professionals.

As we know, the IT area had a huge boost during the pandemic, as many organizations had to adapt their business and adapt to new technologies, such as migrating to the cloud, in order to have continuity of their services, especially to comply with the "forced" home office for many organizations.

In this sense, we were able to identify one of the first factors that generated more demand for IT professionals, where employees, partners, and customers needed digital environments, which left many entrepreneurs in need of even more skilled labor.

Competition in sight

Organizations of the most diverse sectors and sizes are fighting among themselves for more developers, and with the acceleration of technological innovations the tendency is for this competition to keep on increasing.

But, what are CEO's doing to differentiate themselves in this reality? Simple: they are looking for newly graduated workers, young people who are starting their lives in the labor market. The point is that even this starting profile is not easy to find, although there are many young people wanting an opportunity, sometimes they still don't have enough understanding and knowledge.

Thus, we identify the second factor, companies need specialists that already come in to solve and help achieve a strategic differential. And that's where the key point in this game of supply and demand lies.

Balancing the Game

To meet the new growing and continuing needs that the market demands, it is necessary to prepare and train professional IT developers who can keep up with innovations and apply new technologies in the most efficient way possible.

According to the Association of Information Technology and Communication Companies (Brasscom), more than 45 thousand people with a technological profile are trained every year, but how many are prepared to work in the sector? And it goes on, by 2024 we will need more than 400 thousand professionals. That's right, there is still plenty of room.

I've been watching and many companies, to get around this difficulty, are starting opportunities for new professionals, who sometimes don't have a degree in the area, but run into the same problem, because they will work on projects related to their deliveries, their core business. So the formation, even if it is technical, for example, ends up serving as a good gateway to the labor market, however, despite having some knowledge, this does not mean that they are prepared for the growing challenges of the sector. The digital world does not stop innovating, nor to undergo major transformations.

The truth is that the training of IT professionals, independent of the course of study in many cases, is necessary to prepare them to understand, act, and solve the different obstacles that the sector continuously presents.

Digital transformation has created this need, no longer for positions, functions, or mastery of emerging tools, but for technical profiles with a predisposition to generate transformation.  

The solution is the same, educate! Only in a new way.

When the focus is on driving innovation, you need to start by investing in the "future", the future professionals. Digital transformation is the basis of new businesses and as technologies support organizations, they move at a fast pace towards transformation. With this in mind, GWCloud arrived at the PUC/RS Science and Technology Park (TECNOPUC), with the first Smart Innovation Center, the GWAcademy initiative, a project to develop young talents in partnership with transformative educational institutions, moving a collaborative ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship.

GWAcademy's innovation consists in generating a competence core for the development of MVPs and studies, in which new incoming professionals access real corporate dynamics, mainly in the financial, retail, logistics, and telecom sectors, which promotes a transformation of entrepreneurship in universities and fosters the composition of new solutions and startups.

GWAcademy's young talents will have a financial scholarship and a monitored process of evaluation and professional development applied to real business opportunities, which will be worked out in our innovation center, a physical environment, innovative and collaborative, designed for co-creation and based on agile development methodologies.

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