Tech has a skills issue – and it’s one that’s not going away in 2024. Live team coaching can be an important part of the solution.

‘The skills gap has become somewhat of a fixture in the tech industry, and after a turbulent year, rapid tech hiring is no longer a viable option for the many companies pursuing more productivity or innovation at lower cost.

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With VC funding less forthcoming in 2023, teams slimmed down to make ends meet. Leaders are being pushed to do more with what they already have. That’s not helped by the rapid pace of technological change – it’s estimated that the half-life of technical skills is already less than 2.5 years. That means that skills gaps are opening up within teams all the time, and competition is fierce for software engineers with the right niche of skills (e.g., deep expertise in AI and data science). After all, non-tech companies, such as those in retail and finance, now want those developers, too. And remote working has meant local talent is being pursued by the whole world.

It’s a crisis that has the potential to severely curb business ambitions. A 2023 Gartner survey found technology executives see the talent shortage as the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies that enable innovation versus 4% in 2020. Not being able to utilize the best technology is leading to delays, low productivity, more errors and the release of inadequate products.

The tech sector is between a rock and a hard place, and something needs to change. By considering how skills are nurtured internally, startups and scaleups can begin to overcome the barriers holding them back. 

Coaching Can be the Fast Track to Team Success

The tech industry has been addicted to hiring as a means of improving a team’s abilities and an organization’s output. That’s no longer a viable option. The sector needs a marked shift in favor of developing its current people so they’re agile, resilient and rapidly able to achieve expertise in technologies with ease.

This is important for software developers, too. Learning and growth are a developer’s second priorities when choosing a job –  higher than their compensation. Historically, this need has been half-solved by giving people access to resources – books, videos, lunch and learns, etc. These kinds of perks have become the standard, and they remain nothing more than perks. Few leaders have invested in meaningful learning and real growth in their existing developers’ capabilities toward a strategic goal. What would that look like? Adopting technologies, increasing abilities, and improving outputs through learning rather than hiring.

Live team coaching taps into the potential of a company’s people. It focuses on the specific needs and goals of an organization and the skills gaps that exist within the individuals on a team. With regular coaching from a live expert, software engineers can build a deep understanding and develop new capabilities through problem-solving and feedback. More innovative features are built faster, with higher-quality code and fewer bugs. And the confidence and resilience of the team as a whole is improved. Technologies and targets that once seemed out of reach become achievable.

That has clear business benefits. With next-generation technologies, developers can work more productively and innovatively. AI, for example, can automate large parts of coding and debugging, leaving software engineers with more capacity for higher-level work. Research by GitHub, which polled 90,000 developers in its most recent survey, found a third of developers said AI has increased their productivity, and one in four are achieving greater efficiency.

Targeted learning can also help developers work smarter, removing bottlenecks and streamlining workflows. Almost two-thirds (63%) of the developers GitHub surveyed spent more than 30 minutes a day searching for answers or solutions to problems, and 53% agreed they’re slowed down at work by waiting for answers. Imagine the boost in productivity if they had access to targeted learning, which would bring solutions to those problems well within reach.

Confidence and Resilience

That’s what happened at Datamaran. The company has created a software analytics platform that identifies and monitors the risks and opportunities of ESG strategies, and they have been using live team coaching with its 20 developers for just over a year, with a particular focus on developing their skills in Python and JavaScript.

Datamaran’s CTO and co-founder Jérôme Basdevant has noted that it’s already had a big impact. Efficiency has improved significantly, and the team can now appropriately use more advanced coding patterns and practices in their work. Basdevant says they’re more autonomous now because he can trust them to write code correctly. Plus, the team has improved their understanding of the complexity of estimation, which has resulted in a more predictable workflow. He’s also been able to hire people from more diverse backgrounds and use live coaching to upskill them on the job.

Constantly Bridging the Gap

In some respects, the industry must become comfortable with the fact that the skills gap is here to stay–with rapidly changing technology, then the skill set of a perfect team will be a moving target.  However, if organizational leadership—and that means the whole C-suite, not just the CTO—finds an ongoing continual solution, then teams will reach their potential and achieve more. If managers change their mindset and adopt long-term and continuous learning, which is built into the working day, then their teams will have the ability to not just keep moving forward but to accelerate.