As companies transition to a cloud-native model, many are struggling to find talent for technical roles. According to OpsRamp’s recent Cloud Skills Survey, this skills gap crisis is inhibiting innovation, impacting productivity, and affecting revenue growth.

Of those that responded to the survey, 94 percent stated that they struggled to find candidates with the right background and skills to drive innovation. Ninety-four percent also stated that it took over one month to recruit candidates, and in a tight labor market, 25 percent of hiring managers said that it could take over three months to find the right candidate.

Ninety percent of hiring manager reports that the skills gap is “somewhat big, quite big, or huge.”

Almost one third of those that responded think that the demand for cloud-native skills is outpacing the existing pool of talent.

In order to compensate, over 77 percent of companies utilize a managed service provider in order to meet their IT needs.

OpsRamp offered three recommendations for organizations to follow to ensure that they are able to keep up:

  1. Begin to address the skills deficit now by bringing in external expertise, invest in training and development of existing staff, and partner with solution providers.
  2. Invest in current IT teams with training and certification opportunities.
  3. Build the right cultural foundation consisting of strategies, technologies, and process that make it easier to launch agile experiments.

“New processes, however, don’t emerge out of thin air. They come from both the adoption of new technologies, like cloud-native approaches, but also from an appropriate and parallel shift in attitudes and skill sets. Modern enterprises looking for competitive advantage need to commit to digital transformation at the process, technology, and people levels. Innovation depends on it,” OpsRamp wrote in the report.