Diversity is not just important for tech – it’s an essential part of its future

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How can organisations leverage one of tech’s greatest challenges – a lack of diversity – to solve another: the growing cloud skills gap

It’s no secret that tech has a diversity problem. For years we’ve seen reports of bias against people of colour in facial recognition software and sexist credit card algorithms. As recently as 2020, just 5.5 per cent of new hires that year were black.

Historically, the space has been seen as dominated by white men. According to a survey, the total estimated black, hispanic, and indigenous population of Silicon Valley sat at a paltry 5 per cent. And that was pre-pandemic.

Then there’s the impact of the pandemic itself. We know the pandemic opened up some opportunities for minority groups – moving to remote working made a lot of roles more accessible to people with disabilities, for example. We also know that it hindered efforts to increase more diverse hiring significantly across multiple sectors, and had a greater negative impact on working women compared with their male peers.

And there’s one more thing the pandemic impacted – it transformed the face of the tech sector, in many ways for good.

How the pandemic reshaped tech

In 2020, the pandemic triggered a frenzied dash for companies in nearly every sector to provide their services or products virtually, practically overnight.

This process, known as digital transformation, has been a buzzword in recent years, but its roots go as far back as the late nineties, and during and after lockdowns, it became increasingly essential for businesses looking to survive in modern, digital-first markets.

In fact, it’s so essential in a post-pandemic world that leading figures have estimated that nearly two years’ worth of digital transformation was conducted in the first two months of the pandemic alone. And it hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down just yet.

Why the growing skills gap has gone from a problem to a catastrophe

In 2019, it was estimated that the skills gap had an estimated $302 billion impact on business – in just one year. Since then, the tech skills gap has grown so much this figure has been revised to $775bn worldwide.

And in a sector where skilled professionals were already in incredibly short supply, many companies’ attempts to rebuild after the pandemic and undergo digital transformation have – quite simply – been decimated.

Nearly 80 per cent of IT decision-makers surveyed in 2021 consider a lack of digital skills as the number one challenge for meeting present and future business needs. With so few tech professionals available, businesses have fast become over-reliant on increasingly in-demand contractors, and many companies have fallen behind on critical digital transformation projects. This is a huge problem for tech, for two reasons.

Firstly, when candidates are already in short supply, diversity becomes an issue that fewer and fewer companies can devote resources to improving. This risks locking women, people of colour, and other marginalised groups out for good, undoing years of collective work to improve the diversity in our sector.

Secondly, such a short supply of candidates in the space could inhibit the overall economic recovery of the sector and lead to billions in lost revenue. Ultimately, if the tech skills gap is not closed in the next five years, we could risk losing $12 trillion in global GDP revenue by 2028.

Using one problem to solve another

Historically, the lack of representation in tech has been an incredibly complex challenge, often compounded by the skills gap seen across multiple technologies. Not only has talent creation in the sector struggled to keep up with the demand for talent, but the talent that has been generated has been predominantly white and male.

These problems are complex and intersectional: the more the skills gap grows, the less able companies are to improve their diversity, which subsequently narrows their scope for finding new candidates and increases their skills gap yet again.

When we created Revolent, we knew that our sector’s best answer for bridging the skills gap was to focus on diversity, so we made sure that encouraging diverse and inclusive hiring was one of our core organisational strategies.

Diversity and the skills gap may be our two biggest foes, but they are by no means unrelated. It’s not like it was 20 years ago, when you’d need to pay hefty bootcamp or college fees to learn a specialist IT technology. Theoretically, anyone with an internet connection can learn the basics of cloud technologies, as the internet has levelled access to learning resources. What is often lacking is the support and opportunity to apply that knowledge in practice.

All it takes is for the right organisation, with a proper understanding of how to build diverse tech teams, to come along and match professionals who are interested in reskilling or cross-training with the thousands of businesses out there that desperately need their help. Which is what we’ve been doing since 2019.

At Revolent, we recruit existing tech professionals from a diverse range of backgrounds and cross-train them in core technologies. We help individuals begin an incredible new career in the cloud, and we help businesses by providing the talent they’re so desperately in need of.

And it’s working. Each year we’re partnering with more and more companies to build diverse talent pipelines, as people are realising that our business model allows us to flexibly and quickly plug skills gaps across a broad range of technologies.

And that very flexibility that has been our success? It comes directly from our ability to widen the net and source from a more diverse range of hiring pools than traditional recruitment routes.

Research shows that now, more than ever, the most successful companies are those that actively champion diversity. And, when it comes to cloud technologies, diversity is no longer just a moral imperative, it’s essential for our survival and growth as a sector.

To find out more about Revolent’s cloud talent creation programs, or to partner with us, visit our website

Nabila Salem, President, Revolent (Courtesy of Revolent)

Originally published on Business Reporter