The 2024 State of Tech Talent Report

On April 16, the Linux Foundation published the 2024 State of Tech Talent Report, a comprehensive examination of global trends in technology talent acquisition, retention, and management. It explores current technical skills development considerations and organizational strategies amid emerging technologies and economic challenges. In short, it’s a must-read for anyone seeking to better understand the current tech talent landscape. 

What the report reveals is that organizations are shifting toward new approaches in managing technical talent, moving away from traditional hiring methods that have proven to be time consuming, expensive, and often unsuccessful. The focus now is on upskilling and cross-skilling, with 64% of tech leaders surveyed acknowledging a lack of essential skills or experience in candidates. Economic shifts have further prompted organizations to rethink their talent management strategies. Data from the study illustrates a variety of strategies employed for technical talent management, with a significant emphasis on upskilling and cross-skilling.

The study revealed that preferences in technical talent management vary across different technology domains. For cloud technology, which respondents ranked as a top priority for talent, 54% of the surveyed organizations preferred to upskill or cross-skill existing employees, compared with 24% prioritizing hiring technical staff and 22% favoring hiring consultants. This shift toward upskilling and cross-skilling signifies a strategic adaptation to the evolving technological landscape, allowing organizations to empower their existing workforce and address skill gaps more effectively. It also reflects a recognition of the long-term benefits of investing in employee development and fostering a culture of continuous learning within the organization. 

This survey also asked respondents to address the impact of economic headwinds on their technical headcount. Despite economic uncertainties, most organizations did not reduce their technical headcount in 2023, underscoring the strategic value placed on technical expertise, especially in areas such as cloud computing, DevOps, cybersecurity, and AI/ML.

Technical recruiting remains a formidable challenge for organizations, with 43% citing its costliness, time-consuming nature, and frequent failure to find suitable candidates as primary concerns. 

This difficulty is exacerbated by the 38% of organizations reporting that recruitment issues can lead to project delays, while 37% struggle with verifying claimed technical skills. Delving deeper into these challenges, explicit questions were posed regarding the duration of the hiring process; these revealed that organizations spend an average of 5.4 months on recruitment, with 64% taking over four months to fill open positions.

Particularly concerning is the trend indicating a lengthening hiring process compared with 2023, with an average time of 4.6 months. Analysis across different technical roles reveals consistent timelines, with executive management roles requiring the longest recruitment periods, averaging 6.2 months, followed by AI/ML engineers and SRE/platform engineers. Conversely, front-end/back-end developers and network administrators generally have shorter hiring periods. Onboarding poses similar challenges, with an average time of 4.8 months and 58% of organizations requiring more than four months to achieve normal productivity. Alarmingly, the data indicates a significant rate of turnover among new hires, with two out of five technical recruits experiencing resignation or layoff within the first six months, a higher rate compared with 2023 (29%).

The report also addresses the impact of emerging technologies such as generative AI (GenAI) on workforce planning, revealing both challenges and opportunities in terms of workforce restructuring. GenAI continues to revolutionize workplaces with intelligent automation, prompting a reevaluation of technical talent management strategies. The adoption of GenAI technologies resulted in a reduction of technical staff for 18% of organizations in 2023, with a projected increase to 27% in 2024. Notably, midsize organizations appear more affected by this trend. However, the data also reveals that only a small percentage of organizations experience consistent staff reductions, suggesting that GenAI has not yet reached a level of maturity where annual downsizing is the norm. While specific roles impacted by GenAI remain unidentified, it is expected to streamline routine tasks, creating an opportunity for workforce upskilling across a broad skillset adaptable beyond GenAI applications, IT infrastructure monitoring, and software development emerging as primary domains. Despite its transformative potential, customer support and helpdesk services rank lower in GenAI utilization, possibly due to existing automation in these areas, as only 5% of organizations have no plans to integrate GenAI.

The methodology employed in this study involved a web survey conducted by the Linux Foundation and its partners from late December 2023 to early February 2024, aiming to provide fresh insights into the global landscape of technology talent acquisition, retention, and management. The survey collected data from a diverse range of industries, including industry-specific IT vendors and service providers and non-profit, academic, and government organizations, representing various company sizes and geographical regions. The survey comprised 42 questions covering topics such as cloud native computing, containers, Kubernetes, cybersecurity, and webAssembly. Out of 1,455 initial candidates, 418 records met the screening criteria and formed the basis for the analysis, ensuring the reliability and validity of the findings across diverse industries and geographical regions.

For complete findings and actionable insights into how your organization should approach technical talent acquisition, management, and retention, click the link below: