The Internet of Things is staking-up to be the largest and perhaps the most impactful era of accelerated technological advancement in history. Some have projected that IoT has the potential to drive the national economic growth of multiple countries that take a leadership position in this IoT era. One recent article placed the IoT economy at $19 trillion and estimated the number of IoT devices to hit 200 billion in the next several years. The opportunities run the spectrum and cut across virtually every industry. You would think that this is a huge opportunity for all those that plan and properly execute and grab their piece of the pie. A closer look found that it is really not that simple.
Consider for a moment all the work designing, producing, installing and maintaining all of those IoT devices. With between 50 and 200 billion devices, that is a huge amount of work. Members of the UK Parliament have called for urgent action to be taken in an effort to address the country’s substantial shortfall in what they called digital skills. They went on to express concern that this shortage places the country at a competitive disadvantage. Valid concerns to be sure. Now stop and consider all the technical resources needed to collect, store and analyze the massive amount of data all those devices will produce. Those skills are not plentiful today and will be in short supply as the IoT era progresses.
However, this issue is not isolated to the UK. One recent piece of analysis indicated that while there are currently more than 500,000 open computing jobs in the United States, a mere 50,000 computer science graduates enter the workforce per year. That is in total not just for IoT related jobs.
IoT companies will have to compete with companies in 3D Printing, Artificial Intelligence, Connected Vehicles, Robotics, Wearable Technology and of course Big Data along with traditional IT for those resources.
Back to the IoT. What about the current workforce? I wondered: how IoT tech savvy are they? I decided to conduct one of those back-of-the-envelope surveys. Over the past few months I asked individuals that attended several of my speaking engagements that cover emerging technology about their view of IoT. This is what I found most concerning. Many of those in management that I asked really did not understand what IoT was and how it will impact their organization. A Google search on IoT retuned over 62 million identified links. With so much activity online, how is it that some people have never heard of the Internet of Things?
While far from being a scientific study, I just asked if people knew what the Internet of Things was. I took the sometimes long-winded responses and put it into three general buckets. Here are the top answers:
- No I have not heard of IoT. What is it? 45%
- I have heard of it, but do not know much about it. 30%
- Yeah, I have heard about it and it is supposed to be coming. 25%
When they replied with answer number three, I did ask questions to make sure that their replies were accurate. A few times was the answer inaccurate. I have to say that many of those that fell into grouping number three had a very limited understanding of scope and magnitude of IoT. So a whopping 75 percent really were uninformed when it comes to IoT. Multiple academic, governmental, and even some defense organizations have expressed concerns that a shortage of properly trained human resources could be the roadblock to capitalizing on this era of rapid technological advancement from many countries that were tech leaders in the Internet era. Particularly troubling was on view that given the magnitude of the projected IoT market, failure to capitalize on this technology movement could very well cause economic difficulties that might very well rise to a national challenge for some countries. Is it too late? Has the time passed for governments to take the steps necessary to address this huge shortage in digital skills? One thing is certain, for those with the digital skills shortage, every passing day the situation gets worse.
About the author: Kevin Coleman is a speaker, author and advisor to some of the world’s most progressive organizations, including multiple Fortune 500 businesses, the United Nations, the Congress of the United States and U.S. Strategic Command. Kevin has more than 20 years of experience in the development and implementation of cutting-edge technology strategies and was the Chief Strategist at Netscape.
Edited by
Ken Briodagh
