Navigate the shortage of technological talents

Develop both technical skills and human capacities

• The traditional approach: Focus on the acquisition and creation of technical capacities.
• The transformational imperative: Create experiences for workers to share hidden skills and develop new technological skills as well as sustainable capacities.

Skills half -life – in particular technological skills – shrinks. This can help explain why Deloitte respondents 2024 World Trends of Human Capital The research said that they spend around 50% time in addition to new skills compared to the previous year.¹⁷

To create new talent models at a time when technology progresses so quickly that tasks can quickly become obsolete, organizations should embrace skills on static and immutable jobs. Organizations that adopt a skills -based approach are 63% more likely to achieve business results than those who do not.¹⁸ This skills -based approach can include efforts to collect and use traditional skills data – including technical and commercial skills – as part of a greater effort to quantify the organization.¹⁹

This type of skills -based approach is particularly useful for technological talents because it allows an organization to quickly redeploy internal talents to fill skills gaps and meet urgent priorities. Often, workers participate in a role with skills and capacities that go beyond the specific requirements of their employment. Likewise, many long -term technological workers have accumulated relevant skills during a career that is neglected during concentration only on their recent projects and work. These skills can be identified via open source platforms, hackathons and external certifications. These skills can also be identified by analyzing the work linked to the work generated by workers via digital work applications, intelligent work sensors, portable devices and voice and video calls. Thanks to these solutions, organizations can develop a more in -depth understanding of existing skills and technological capacities of their workers²⁰ and can identify hidden skills. This helps them to increase the responsibilities of their workers and give them the opportunity to take up different challenges. In addition, it can offer organizations the ability to quickly meet urgent needs thanks to existing technological talents.

This analysis can help technological leaders identify “unicorns” – workers within the organization who have skills that cross technical, industry or functional expertise. Such an analysis can also identify workers that are well suitable for new projects based on past work deliverables, their connections and the teams with which they have worked before. This approach can help support a broader need to bring together commercial, technical and customer skills and invest in the development of technological talents that can speak largely about customer interests and commercial needs.²¹

Heads of technology is increasingly considering human capacities as essential to the development of technological talents, according to Deloitte 2025 Global study of technological leadership.²² When they were asked to identify the skills that will be the most essential for their technological function in the next two years, the leaders of technology have classified leadership as the most critical, followed by problem solving, relational skills, creativity and imagination. Among the five main skills identified, only one is mainly technical in nature.

But there is a substantial gap between knowing and acting when it comes to investing in human capacities: according to Deloitte 2024 World Trends of Human Capital Research, 73% of respondents said that it was important to ensure that the human capacities of organization follow the pace of technological innovation, but only 9% say they are progressing towards the realization of this balance.²³

In the end, skills are often acquired through experiences, and managers can help overcome shortages of technological skills by finding opportunities to create experiences to accelerate skills development. By associating continuous workforce planning with a skills-based approach, organizations can start developing longer beach plans to develop new skills through the labor market which can help alleviate the challenges related to a constant landscape for technological skills. Organizations can also use this understanding to intentionally create development experiences for technological talents by creating agile teams rather than waiting for a role to emerge within the organization. Additional accelerators can be found outside the current company. Technological talents may include participation in open source communities. In a survey of developers working on open-source projects, 35% of respondents said that work on these projects had helped them develop new skills for their work.²⁴

An alternative to promoting experiences outside the company is to use digital playgrounds, which can offer workers opportunities to test new ideas and explore new skills.²⁵ Digital playgrounds can be safe spaces for workers to experiment and co-create products, services and ways of working.

For example, the Banker of Coldwell, Richard Ellis, a commercial company for real estate and investment services, has created an internal sandbox environment where workers could use a Gen AI model to question real estate data and obtain answers to their questions. The AI ​​playground has attracted more than 3,000 users, the software engineers who use it to write code and generate test scripts and marketing support managers by using them to question real estate data and generate responses in a safe environment.²⁶