The cloud skills shortage that’s omnipresent in British business seems to be forcing companies to turn a blind eye on candidates lacking certification. This is according to Microsoft’s newly released report, entitled "Microsoft Cloud Skills Report: Closing the Cloud Skills Chasm." Polling UK businesses for the report, 45 percent said certifications are "nice to have," but just 35 per cent said they’re desirable or essential. The report calls this proportion "surprisingly low," questioning if this could "be a further symptom of the challenges of finding people with adequate skills in the first place". It’s also interesting to see how businesses… [Continue Reading]
UK organizations consider cloud skills essential to digital transformation, according to a new report by Microsoft. Entitled "Microsoft Cloud Skills Report: Closing the Cloud Skills Chasm", it says 83 percent of UK’s organizations consider cloud skills "important" or "critical" to digital transformation. Those companies with 1000 employees or more consider them "very critical." The report suggests this could be because larger companies are "saddled with a broader tapestry of siloed, legacy systems." Just two percent of respondents had no plans of going more digital. However, finding the right people with the right skills turned out harder than expected. A third of… [Continue Reading]
When it comes to cloud skills, there’s a significant gender gap, and it’s particularly visible in the UK. This is according to a new report by Microsoft, entitled "Microsoft Cloud Skills Report: Closing the Cloud Skills Chasm." According to it, the gender mix among technical IT staff is 20 percent female versus 80 percent male. In just a fifth of companies (21 percent) the gender mix was 40 percent or greater. Microsoft says this gender imbalance is "concerning," but perhaps even more concerning is the fact that very few companies are actually doing something about it. A third (35 percent)… [Continue Reading]
Over the past 25 years, SMS text messaging has become the most personal and ubiquitous form of communication in the digital era. In fact, it hasn’t simply held its ground, it’s actually gained momentum -- with global consumers preferring to communicate with businesses through this intuitive channel. As technology continues to bolster SMS capabilities, a new form of mobile messaging known as Rich Communications Services (RCS) is making waves in the mobile revolution. Leading the charge, OpenMarket has joined forces with Google to help businesses realize the full capabilities of RCS messaging for customer engagement. We caught up with its senior market development… [Continue Reading]
Many IT teams are looking for a way out of the quagmire of delayed projects, questionable quality, and missed deliveries in which they often find themselves without writing blank cheques. The concept of DevOps has taken the IT world by storm, but has the day-to-day practice caught up? Brian Dawson, DevOps expert, CloudBees discusses how this new approach can help these IT projects can progress and transform businesses. ITPP: Would you say DevOps is a technology or an approach? Since the earliest days of DevOps there have been debates about what DevOps actually is, so that’s a fair question! Fortunately,… [Continue Reading]
UK's Science and Technology Committee recently published a report stating that the digital skills gap is costing the UK economy £63 billion a year in lost GDP. It’s a time of turbulent change, both politically and economically and fostering home grown talent with the most up to date digital skills is more important than ever. We caught up with Julian Wragg, EMEA Managing Director at online IT learning provider Pluralsight, to see what can be done to address the STEM and IT skills gap in the UK. ITPP: What skills exactly are lacking? Is it solely the much-talked-about STEM subjects… [Continue Reading]