Today, professionals need digital skills to work with new technologies, while businesses need digital solutions to keep up to date with rapid changes in society. The demand from the public and private sector for people with digital skills is high but the supply is low, with businesses often struggling to find talent for digital roles, particularly early career roles, even in the current economic climate. The impact of all this is to further dampen economic growth, slow transformation of everyday services, and make it challenging for people to access rewarding careers in technology.
According to research earlier this year, in EU countries 57% of enterprises find it difficult to fill ICT specialist roles. In fact, Europe needs 20 million ICT specialists by 2030, but at current trends this target will be missed. If things don’t change the EU will achieve less than half of the potential economic value of its Digital Decade, the equivalent of 1.5 trillion euros. The EU Digital Decade is part of the block’s digital strategy to ensure current technology based transformations work for people and businesses, while helping to achieve a climate-neutral Europe by 2050.
AWS re/Start has given businesses like ours access to very high-quality people who are ready to hit the ground running on our transformational work in the cloud.
Looking more widely at the international picture, according to new research more than two-thirds of companies (70%) report hiring challenges when it comes to roles requiring digital skills.
Understanding the importance of addressing this challenge, the leading cloud services provider is helping the EU change this situation and bridge the skills gap. AWS leaders committed to providing free cloud skills training to 29 million people worldwide by 2025. Now in its second year, the company and its partners have trained more than 13 million people globally.
There are a wide range of training courses and with hundreds of training providers to offer a wide range of free cloud skills training opportunities every year to help people reskill and gain an entry point to in demand cloud jobs – delivered both virtually and locally, in the region. One of those programs is called AWS re/Start.
Ignasi Aranda Casals, Head of AWS Technology at NTT DATA, says, “AWS re/Start has given businesses like ours access to very high-quality people who are ready to hit the ground running on our transformational work in the cloud. It’s hard to find diverse talent with cloud skills in Spain, and in our other countries in Europe and Latam, and so this program is a huge help for us. I would encourage other technology business leaders to take a good look at AWS re/Start to help them find talented people.”
Claire Spiller, the head of AWS re/Start for EMEA says, “I’m so proud of the work that our collaborating organisations and partners are doing to re-skill these individuals, and thrilled that firms are gaining highly-motivated and skilled candidates to drive their businesses forward. There are countless lives being changed in [HDE1] EMEA as a result of this program, and it is just one part of Amazon’s global commitment to train 29 million people in cloud skills by 2025.”
For more information visit www.aboutamazon.eu/news/aws/aws-helps-the-eu-bridge-the-digital-skills-gap
