IT leaders’ AI talent needs hinge on reskilling

CIOs and HR managers are changing their equations on hiring and training, with a bigger focus on reskilling current employees to make good on the promise of AI technologies.

That shift is in no small part due to an AI talent market increasingly stacked against them. With AI talent in high demand, the shortage of AI technicians available will only get worse, some hiring experts say, as job postings for workers with AI expertise are growing 3.5 times faster than for all jobs, according to a recent PwC report.

Worse, university pipelines don’t appear to be providing relief anytime soon. Although some colleges already offer AI classes, many haven’t had time to create new programs to meet the increased demand from the new AI boom, which started with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.

“We’re going to have much more demand than we have supply, at least until people start to skill up, and at least until universities start to have graduates who come out with expertise,” says Malavika Sagar, senior vice president and CHRO at TE Connectivity, a manufacturer of sensors and parts used in appliances, wearable devices, intelligent buildings, vehicles, and military aircraft. “I do believe we’re going to have a little bit of a crunch here for the next four to five years.”

As a result, organizations such as TE Connectivity are launching internal training programs to reskill IT and other employees about AI. Such programs, IT and HR leaders believe, will give their organizations added benefits that a hiring-heavy approach to AI needs isn’t likely to provide.

Rethinking talent strategies

To address its AI crunch, TE Connectivity just launched a four-tier training program that will range from basic education about AI and how to use it in office jobs to ways engineers can use AI to help design specific products. The company is also working with universities on AI-based product design challenges for students.

The company recognizes that it will need to take a “dual approach,” by training current employees to work with AI, but also hiring AI technicians from the outside, Sagar says. Outside AI expertise will be needed, but current employees have institutional knowledge that new employees will lack.

 “There has to be a marriage between the AI skill sets that somebody can bring and the practical application of what that means at the company level,” she says. “You can come in with the best expertise in the domain, but you really don’t know how the company, the applications are not as effective.”

TE Connectivity appears to be ahead of the pack with its retraining and reskilling programs, according to a new survey from Deloitte.

Deloitte’s State of Generative AI in the Enterprise report for the second quarter of 2024, found that 75% of the nearly 2,000 IT and line-of-business leaders surveyed anticipate changing their talent strategies within the next two years because of generative AI. Less than one in five say they are already changing their approach to hiring and training.

Slightly less than half of the leaders planning changes say they will focus on reskilling employees, and a similar percentage plan to redesign work processes to take advantage of generative AI. Over a third plan to launch AI fluency programs, and another third want to reassess their talent acquisition strategies.

An AI talent shortage will hit both the IT side of businesses and the strategic side, says Deborshi Dutt, US AI strategic growth leader at Deloitte.

“On the front end, AI-skilled employees will be crucial to organizations’ ability to develop and refine their solutions,” he says. “On the back end, there’s a critical need to understand how the workforce could be affected by large-scale generative AI deployment and then develop the appropriate talent strategies.”

Companies should be proactive about acquiring AI talent, using both training programs with their current employees and hiring programs to attract outside experts, he advises. Reskilling employees is a crucial step, he adds.

“In the near term, building AI education and fluency within an organization’s workforce will be especially important to fostering adoption and overcoming initial resistance to change,” he says. “In the longer term, upskilling or reskilling paired with redesigning work processes and career paths will be essential for capturing generative AI’s full value and positioning workers for future success.”

Meanwhile, leaders surveyed countered fears of AI taking away employee jobs, with just 22% expecting enterprise headcounts to decrease because of gen AI. Nearly four in 10 expect no change in employee numbers because of gen AI, and about the same percentage expect employee numbers to increase due to gen AI deployments.

Changing hearts and minds

Generative AI is already creating demand for a new set of skills. Data engineering, prompt engineering, and coding will be the IT skills most in demand, but critical thinking, creativity, flexibility, and the ability to work in teams will also be highly valued, according to the survey.

That mix of technical and soft skills is another factor shaping the shift toward reskilling for AI. After all, with AI technologies developing rapidly, flexibility will be key, TE Connectivity’s Sagar says.

“There’s this piece around change management that’s really important here because we’ve got to let go the resistance and really think about how this can add value to us,” she says. “Agility is very important, because this is so new, and technological advances are going to come fast.”

Here, an emphasis on training — rather than looking solely to hire for AI needs — can better position the workforce at large to evolve with and deliver long-term value using AI.

Like TE Connectivity, enterprise content services firm Hyland sees employee training as a major way to build AI expertise, says Steve Watt, CIO there.

In a March survey of 900 workers that already use AI tools, Hyland found that 95% were confident in their use of AI tools, but 98% wanted more training or support. More than half wanted company-specific AI training, and nearly half wanted regular knowledge-sharing meetings. Over a third wanted an AI mentor or help desk.

Like Sagar, Watt sees value in retaining and retraining current employees. “I truly think the people are going to be more important,” he says. “As much as we talked about generative AI potentially replacing roles or operations, you don’t want to lose all of the business acumen and historical knowledge you have in those individuals.”

Even if AI replaces some routine job functions, like pulling together information and writing a basic data analysis report, a person will still need to review it and extract insights, he says. “Those same people who were writing reports that were that were key to your data analytics and reporting teams are the ones who have an underlying knowledge of what that gen AI tool is bringing to the surface,” he says.

Watt’s goal is for at least half of the Hyland IT department employees to have a basic AI certification, whether from Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, AWS, or another vendor, by the end of the year. Watt wants the department to develop a range of AI skills to be prepared for the changes coming to his company.

“We still have a lot of learning to do, but we’re trying to build a capabilities matrix that will help us navigate AI more in the future,” he says. “If it is not in your toolbox in the next five years, you’re going to be way behind the curve. This is the best time to learn it, start getting acclimated to it, because it’s not going away.”