How Cross-Skilling Can Help Address IT Skills Gaps

For state and local agencies, the perpetual challenge of closing the IT skills gap is only growing more difficult. As always, agencies compete for a limited talent pool with the private sector, where companies can offer bigger salaries and more flexibility and hire more quickly. But now, technology is evolving faster, widening that skills gap and making it harder still to hire and retain talent.

Instead of relying on external talent, agencies need to invest more in their existing IT staff, expanding their skills to address both existing gaps and emerging technologies, said Tony Holmes, Pluralsight’s Practice Lead for Solutions Architects for Public Sector. This approach is known as cross-skilling.

“This is beyond filling jobs,” he said. “It’s about future-proofing the IT team by creating cross-skilled expert generalists who can think across disciplines and adapt to new technologies as they arrive.”

In this video interview, Holmes discusses how to develop a cross-skilling strategy. Topics include:

• Aligning cross-skilling with an interdisciplinary approach to IT solution areas
• Addressing top IT priorities, including data and artificial intelligence (AI)
• Using AI and data to build learning paths that support employee development and team resilience