Four steps for Chinese companies to cultivate and retain cloud-skilled talent

[April 20, 2022] According to Gartner's latest survey, the shortage of cloud-skilled talent has made the competition for talent among Chinese companies increasingly fierce.

"Infrastructure and operations leaders need to analyze cloud capability gaps and work with human resources to create new positions, plan career paths, and identify feasible incentives to develop and retain cloud-skilled talent," said Yinling Zhang, research director at Gartner.

A recent Gartner survey shows that insufficient skills/resources are the top challenges faced by infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders (see Figure 1). Many Chinese companies are paying increasing attention to cloud projects , hoping to support business innovation, improve agility, and optimize costs through such projects. However, internal employees have limited cloud skills, and adopting cloud technology is not easy.

Figure 1: Top challenges facing I&O leaders

The method of cultivating and retaining talents can be divided into four steps, as shown in Figure 2. Each step does not need to be carried out in sequence and can be implemented simultaneously or successively.

Figure 2: Four steps to develop and retain talent

Encourage talent participation

In many large Chinese companies, only a small number of management personnel are involved in the formulation and discussion of cloud strategies, and ordinary employees have almost no opportunity to provide feedback. The cloud strategy communicated to employees is often from the perspective of senior management; everyone has a different interpretation of the ultimate goal, and employees cannot clearly understand the responsibilities they need to bear.

Therefore, I&O leaders should set up a continuous communication mechanism for cloud strategy within the enterprise and adopt a more systematic interactive approach.

Identify capability gaps

Before hiring new employees to complete cloud deployment tasks, conduct a skills and capabilities assessment of internal employees. This helps organizations identify internal skills gaps and make better staffing decisions.

Promote internal employees

At this stage, I&O leaders have a clear understanding of the skills and capabilities within the organization. The next steps are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Promoting internal employees

Take incentives

One risk that companies face is that once employees have completed their skill upgrades or updates, they will become more in-demand and may leave. To avoid this risk, I&O leaders must work with HR leaders and other IT department leaders to develop an effective employee retention strategy:

• Update job descriptions.

• Update job benefits.

• Provide non-material incentives.

• Set career development paths.