Skilling Early Talent has immense potential to address Talent Shortage

Introduction

IT shops need to rethink and re-strategise their Talent Acquisition approaches. Being in 2022, there are hardly any other options. As we speak to our TA colleagues across the industry, it's the same grim situation everywhere. Massive demand and acute shortfall of technology resources across skills and levels.

The current and traditional approaches are still focused on and scrambling for the same talent pool that is there in the industry hence, wherever strategy you apply, the end result, the industry-wide shortage is not getting helped.

Skill Challenges with Early Talent

90% of Early Talent or Freshers do not get "Skilled" during their undergrad courses. The reasons are debatable and outside of the scope of this article. However, almost 100% of the freshers have to go through technical induction aka Corporate training & skilling programs when joining the industry. So unfortunate is the skill issue is that despite skills like Java and RDBMS being part of the undergrad curriculum, fresher candidates are unable to start into projects with Java and RDBMS with basic concepts and programming skills missing. Leave alone the existence of modern technologies and skills in undergrad curriculums.

Companies have to forego billing of up to 6 months after freshers' joining to make them productive. Ideally, these 6 months of skilling should have been built in within their undergrad studies. Such loss in some conservative estimates is more than USD 2 million for 100 resources in billing loss for 6 months for a typical IT Services company in India. That's the kind of loss the lack of skills in freshers is causing the Industry.

Finishing schools come to the rescue but we have to bear in mind that the Finishing Schools are expensive and difficult for freshers to afford. Hence, this is also not much of an option.

Issues with Cyclic Nature of Campus Hiring

The other challenge companies face with inducting early talent is that they are not available throughout the year. Campus hiring follows a cycle. Only during the months of June-July every year, do fresh graduates join organisations. For the rest of the year, there are no freshers available to the industry. Off-campus models are available but the skill challenge with off-campus candidates is even more acute.

Challenges with Experienced Hires

Experienced hires are better skilled, however, there is a severe shortage of skilled experienced manpower today, especially in Tech. Compensation demands are touching the sky. Be it Full- Stack Engineers, Data Engineers, Big Data, IT Security, or Machine Learning, the gap between demand and supply is to the extent of 30-40%. That's the seriousness of the problem and companies are losing revenue opportunities in Millions of Dollars.

Invest in Bootcamp Based Skilling programs for Early Talent

Solutions lie within the problems. There is a huge potential pool of candidates who have missed the Campus boat and since looking for opportunities. Skill is an issue for them. This pool of candidates also does not have any guidance on career directions that they can take, hence this population drifts, remains unemployed or underemployed, and a huge amount of potential gets wasted. This is the population, if given guidance and skilling, can solve a large part of our skill challenges. This is something Teksands, a Hiring Service company has put its bets on. As a responsible organisation, we have decided to invest in these candidates, make them industry ready and connect them to companies that are desperately looking for skilled talent.

Teksands Bootcamps are on current and cutting-edge skills like Cloud Data Engineering, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Big Data, Salesforce, Full Stack Development, DevOps, Cyber Security, Cloud Engineering and so on. We scout in the market and find candidates who have missed campus placement but have a base set of skills and lots of hunger to make it to the mainstream Tech Industry. These candidates are then taken through our specialised Bootcamps to make them ready for the Industry. The process is completely free for the candidates. It's a win-win, rather win-win-win for the candidates, industry and Teksands where everyone is a winner due to the risks we have pledged to take by upfront investment on skilling them.

Scaling Bootcamps

For any Bootcamp we have conducted for any of our clients, we keep on receiving repeat Bootcamp requests on multiple technologies leading to serving a large part of their talent needs. The other way the Bootcamps are scaled by us is through rolling them monthly or quarterly for large-scale requirements from organisations. E.g., for one of our client's Cyber Security team, we are serving 15-20 junior candidates per month. This means these many candidates are finding mainstream Tech Careers based on Teksands' initiative.

In summary, investing in the skilling of Early Talent can give a huge boost to organisations' Tech Talent needs. Some focus has to shift from relentlessly seeking experience and expertise to more investment in skilling deserving early talent or freshers. Freshers come with the hunger to learn. They just need to be shown the bigger picture of the tech landscape, to be given career guidance and direction on how to set and go about achieving their goals.