75% of tech professionals believe recruiters overvalue skills

Nearly half (45%) of technology professionals believe a significant part of their job will be automated within ten years, rendering their current skills redundant. The change in technology is so rapid that 94% believe their career would be severely limited if they didn’t teach themselves new technical skills.

Yet when it comes to finding new employees, recruiters are so focused on assessing their current technical skills that they overlook people with great potential.

These are some of the findings from the Harvey Nash Technology Survey 2017, representing the views of more than 3,200 technology professionals from 84 countries.

"It is possible that ten years from now the IT function will look vastly different. Even for those IT professionals relatively unaffected directly by automation, there is a major indirect effect – anything up to four in ten of their work colleagues may be machines by 2027", a Harvey Nash APAC spokesperson told CIO Australia.

As the survey data show, in a rapidly changing industry, the tech skills that are currently at the top of employers' wish lists might soon not be relevant anymore. This could explain why 75% of the respondents said recruiters are too focused on assessing technical skills and overlook good people as a result.

Perhaps partly due to recruiters' strong focus on certain skills, many technology professionals remain in high demand, with survey respondents receiving at least seven headhunt calls in the last year.

While recruiters remain focused on people's current skills, technology professionals themselves are prioritising learning over any other career development tactics to ensure they gain new skills that will help them stay relevant.

For HR professionals looking to help their tech staff develop, it is interesting to note that only 12% of respondents is looking to learn these new skills through formal training, and only 27% sees gaining qualifications as a top priority for their career. Instead, tech professionals expect to learn the most relevant skills through self-learning.

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