Tech Leaders Need to Fill More Than Cybersecurity Skill Gaps

There are hundreds of thousands of open cybersecurity jobs in the United States, making it a workforce development priority for CIOs. But what other skills do technology leaders have a hard time finding?

“Some of the skills gaps that are hard to fill are the positions that support the legacy systems. The position descriptions are much more traditional, so we’re working with the Department of Human Resources Development, DHRD, to just try and move those positions, reclassify the positions, rename the positions into perhaps more meaningful descriptions of what the workers do today and what they can do in the future. We also have some of the enterprise architect-type positions that are hard to fill. We’ve been successful at filling business analysts, IT analysts, and they are providing critical resources in our program management office for all of our modernization projects. We could use more of them." — Christine Sakuda, Hawaii Chief Information Officer

“AI comes to mind, because it’s new. We’re all learning. Part of that is hiring some consultants to help us, but we’re finding that they may not know any more than we know. So it’s about working together and learning as we go along. Also, some of the newer technologies. We have a lot of programmers: We have .NET programmers, Java, but now when we want to start to look at other types of platforms in platform as a service, that’s a new skill set that our people are learning. So more of the low-code, no-code options that we have people learning. And then one of the other big things that we’re trying to do is automation. I’m sure everybody says they don’t have enough people, us included. So if we could automate everyday tasks, we could use those people to do things that are a little bit harder, that require more thought and more energy." — Paula Peters, Missouri Deputy Chief Information Officer

“We have lots of skill gaps. Things like low-code environments, data science, artificial intelligence, architecture. Our approach is we have areas of practice that we create that we invite people to attend. They may not do this as a part of their daily job, but it provides them the opportunity if they’re a practitioner or if they just have interest to interact with others and perhaps try, and for us to identify areas where we might have a skill that we can grow out through others in the organization. So we’ve launched one for a couple of our low-code environments that we support and one for artificial intelligence, and we’re going to launch three more next year." — Mark Raymond, Connecticut Chief Information Officer

“From my perspective, our skills gaps lie dominantly in our current technologies and emerging technologies. For example, cloud, cloud engineering, cloud design, cloud architecture, automation, or things like artificial intelligence, or generative AI. Those are areas where we have a high demand, but we do not have enough skilled resources. Another area that comes to my mind is user-centric design. That’s a very important aspect of our ability to deliver services to our residents that allows those services to be more resident-facing and resident-friendly." — Sanjay Gupta, Illinois Chief Information Officer

“That tends to be with the legacy technologies that we have to support. It tends to be technologies that are supporting the mainframe, and that’s where it’s hard to find people that see it as a long-term career. So we do struggle on that front. Most everything else, there tends to be an interest in data security, in most of our common infrastructure or working with our cloud partners. There’s even development staff. There’s a lot of interest in that, but it tends to be those legacy things where we struggle to bring people on. And we’re going to work through that. We’re going to offer certification programs if we can to try to generate interest inside so that we can continue to operate what we need to operate while we transition those legacy technologies to some strategic partners that will help us." — Stephen Miller, Washington D.C. Chief Technology Officer

“We do have a lot of skill gaps when it comes to cybersecurity. Now with AI, that introduces a whole new monster. None of the universities, none of the institutions around the island had programs for it. However, they are being created with broadband funds. We’re also creating that broadband workforce that’s necessary to maintain good broadband infrastructure around the island and make sure that all citizens have access to the digital economy. In cybersecurity with the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program, we’re also developing new programs to incentivize students into pursuing a cybersecurity career, and we also have to create that opportunity for them to practice what they’re studying, to go in and do an internship in the government in cybersecurity, in broadband, in artificial intelligence." — Antonio Ramos Guardiola, Puerto Rico Chief Innovation and Information Officer

This story originally appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Government Technology magazine. Click here to view the full digital edition online.