Shaping The Workforce For Tomorrow - Today

Sammanfattning: The labor market for IT-oriented professions, especially software engineers, is characterized by extensive skills gaps due to fast-evolving technology. The purpose of this thesis is to shed light on the work toward closing the skills gap in IT-oriented professions, especially for software engineers, by providing suggestions on how the workforce can be prepared with the skills needed for tomorrow - already today. The following three research questions have been addressed: What are the main advantages of closing the skills gap? What is the correlation between hard and soft skills when closing the skills gap? What are the main obstacles and enablers affecting organizations' work towards closing the skills gap? Using semi-structured interviews as the primary source of data collection, this exploratory case study investigated the magnitude of the growing skills gap from an academic perspective. This study has yielded that software engineers, managers, executives, and HR will struggle to close the skills gap, as the skills gap will always be apparent due to fast-evolving technology. The conclusion is that employees and employers can proactively work on decreasing the skills gap. The study shows that organizations can do this by building employees' hard and soft skills while simultaneously building a resilient workforce characterized by a growth mindset. A few essential enablers for building these capabilities are ’learning from failure culture’ and ’reskilling’. What hinders it is the lack of time for learning activities. Another hinder is the lack of measurements of soft skills and the added value of learning activities. The two obstacles can be eased by implementing job rotation and managerial coaches. However, future research is needed on how learning activities can be measured and transformed into actionable business outcomes so proactive skill-building can emerge.