The incredible shrinking shelf life of IT skills

FinOps skills are in high demand today.

With organizations fearful of AI initiatives ballooning their cloud costs, the ability to manage cloud environments in a financially efficient way is earning IT pros with FinOps skills a premium of late.

But Ankur Anand, CIO of Harvey Nash, an IT recruitment and outsourcing services provider, wonders whether those skills will be as hot in another year or two, as artificial intelligence and automation become more reliably capable of handling FinOps tasks.

The idea that demand for such skills could rise and fall so quickly is not unique to FinOps, Anand says; it’s applicable to many IT skills today.

“The shelf life of IT skills back in the ’70s or ’80s was a decade or more. Today it can be less than two years,” Anand says.

Anand is not an outlier in making such assertions. The World Economic Forum (WEF) and other thought leaders say the half-life of many workplace skills has shrunk from decades to closer to seven years. A 2023 IBM study found that executives estimate that 40% of their workforce will need to reskill as a result of implementing AI and automation over the next three years. And a 2025 WEF report says workers can expect that 39% of their existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030.

IT workers have seen the half-life of IT skills compressed even more dramatically, with researchers saying some skills today go from hot to not in less than two years — sometimes mere months.

It’s putting a lot of pressure on IT teams. As Anand says, “Technology is developing faster than tech workers can upskill.”

Ever-quickening churn in the IT skills market is upending more than individuals’ career plans, too. It is impacting the entire IT function and the organization as a whole. That in turn is forcing CIOs, HR leaders, and other executives to devise strategies to create an environment where workers are capable of reinvention at a rapid clip.

“IT has a transformation almost every 18 months, and the skills needed in IT are impacted by that. It doesn’t mean skills become obsolete, but it impacts how fluid IT employees need to be,” says Heather Leier-Murray, a research director in the CIO practice at Info-Tech Research Group.

Transforming which IT skills are relevant

In its IT Talent Trends 2025, Info-Tech asserted the idea that “from a technology standpoint, functional skills are becoming outdated every 2.5 years.” It noted that “mature organizations are more likely to see the need to change most if not all their skills. These organizations are also 2.5 times more likely to see AI and ML skills as critical. It will be these IT organizations that have best prepared themselves to deliver on the needs and objectives of the future.”

Furthermore, Info-Tech found that 95% of IT professionals surveyed for the report believe at least some skills will need to change by 2030, with 28% saying most skills need to change and 17% saying all skills need to change.

The pace of technology innovation, which itself has sped up over the decades, is driving the rapid turnover of needed IT skills, says James Stanger, chief technology evangelist at IT training and certification organization CompTIA.

“For example, some folks I know who work in the healthcare industry have noticed that as they create cloud-specific solutions, they’re seeing vendor tools change on an average of one month. Yes, one month,” he says.

AI and automation also have a big impact on what IT skills are needed and which become outdated, IT leaders say. AI and automation are handling a growing number of repetitive tasks that even just a year or two ago had required skilled workers to do. Looking forward, AI and automation will take on even more skilled work, further transforming which IT skills are relevant and which are no longer needed.

“Manual service desk operations, infrastructure management, and deep ERP configuration used to be core competencies and safe skills to bank on, looking out three to six years. Since automation and AI are advancing so quickly, those same skills might only be relevant for the next one to three years before they’re completely transformed by technology,” says Kellie Romack, chief digital information officer of tech company ServiceNow.

Fluid, agile, adaptive workers needed

To be clear, neither Romack nor other IT leaders are saying that IT jobs are becoming obsolete; there is and will remain a need for developers, engineers, architects, security pros, and the like. Rather, they say it’s the functional skills that they need most in their day-to-day roles that are changing faster now than ever before.

CIOs and IT advisers also say the shortening shelf life of skills is not experienced universally, as some organizations still have a lot of legacy tech in place.

Data from the 2025 Tech Salary Report from Dice, a job-searching platform for tech professionals, hints at these dual realities. The report found that skills related to AI, data, and cloud engineering saw the fastest growth in salaries. But some entries on its list of fastest growing tech salaries by skill date back decades. The skills range from natural language processing and document databases, which take the No. 1 and No. 2 spots, to COBOL at No. 7 and Ruby at No. 10.

IT leaders say they can’t predict which functional skills that are hot today might have the staying power of Ruby (created in 1993) or COBOL (created in 1959). Nor are they saying which skills will fade away months from now due to tech advancements and innovation.

Instead, they stress the need for CIOs and their teams to learn how to thrive in what the WEF called “skill instability.”

The days when an IT worker could ensure career longevity by specializing in and sticking with one skill — the Python programming language, for example — are over, CompTIA’s Stanger says.

“Certain skills will come up very quickly and then go away very quickly, so now that person has to be seen as someone who can build up skills quickly,” he adds.

Info-Tech Research Group’s Leier-Murray says CIOs must free up time for their staffers to upskill and provide more coaching to their team members to ensure they keep pace with the work demands of a modern IT shop.

She and others advise CIOs to hire workers with or cultivate in existing staffers a growth mindset.

The IT department at the University of Phoenix is taking such steps, says Ty Jones. Jones is the principal agile people leader for the university’s IT department, a role that CIO Jamie Smith recently created to help prepare staffers for whatever the future of work requires.

“The way that everybody is working is continuously being redefined,” Jones says.

She says IT and HR leaders in September rolled out a list of competencies they believe IT and data workers must have to succeed in a field where skills quickly come and go. Those competencies are creative problem-solving, leadership, ethical use of AI, adaptability, curiosity, grit, communication, technical fluency, future trends, ownership, and innovation.

IT leadership at the university is helping workers develop these competencies through coaching, Jones says, and is allotting them time during their work schedules to master new skills.

“Our engineers and technical teams need to be ready to adopt any emerging skills, and they’re going to need to continue to regenerate,” Jones says. “So we’re emphasizing the ability to adjust and be fluid. We need individuals with curiosity and the ability to learn.”