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Why Real-Time Labor Market Intelligence is the Key to Bridge the Skills Gap in Tech

January 13, 2025

The rapid evolution of technology is disrupting industries and the global economy at an unprecedented pace, bringing both transformative opportunities and significant challenges along the way.

One of the most significant challenges faced by global enterprises in 2025 is the fast-widening skills gap—a disconnect between the skillset’s employers need and the ones employees currently have. 87% of companies worldwide are acknowledging current skills gap within their organizations or anticipating skill shortages in the short run. In the long run, this is set to slow down innovation, disrupt growth, and cost businesses billions in productivity losses and missed opportunities.

Enterprise workforces still have a lot of legacy skillsets – while the digital workflows and economy evolves at breakneck pace.

To close the skills gap, organizations must rethink their approach to workforce planning and talent acquisition – leading with real-time labor market intelligence.

Real-time labor market intelligence empowers workforce planning teams with actionable, updated global insights into skill demands, emerging roles, available talent pool, talent distribution and cost analysis, peer talent acquisition analysis, JD analysis, and more. Such granular data empowers talent acquisition teams to make correct, skills-gap analysis and data-driven talent decisions.

Real-Time Labor Market Intelligence: Use Cases

By identifying emerging skill demands, talent strategy and acquisition teams can gain a decisive edge in innovation, cost efficiency, and market competitiveness while building a future-ready workforce with no skills-gap.

Deloitte’s research indicates that organizations adopting skills-based approaches are 63% more likely to achieve business and workforce outcomes compared to ones that don’t.

Example 1: Consider the case of a workforce planning team within an IT company detecting early blockchain adoption trends and developing internal capabilities six months ahead of competitors. This would help them win more outsourcing deals as they can showcase their delivery capabilities to their prospects. This also helps them deliver seamlessly and achieve optimal customer success and retention.

Example 2: Walmart identified a digital skills gap as e-commerce surged and launched the “Walmart Academy” to upskill employees in digital technologies and data analysis. This proactive strategy (powered by access to skills gap data) not only filled critical gaps but also drove a $2 billion annual revenue increase, a 10% drop in employee turnover, and improved job satisfaction, showcasing how early action in workforce planning drives efficiency and market leadership.

Example 3: In MedTech, augmented reality (AR) is revolutionizing surgical planning and training, but it requires niche skills in 3D modeling and AR development. To address this gap, medical firms can tap into locations with a growing talent pool of software development engineers, gaming engineers etc., compare regional costs and reskill them for delivering/supporting healthcare applications. This strategic move can enable them to build a strong AR team and lead in AR-driven medical innovation while closing the skills-gap.

Example 4: A cloud services provider can leverage real-time skills demand data to identify a surge in demand for quantum computing expertise—a field where job postings has increased by over 260% since 2019. By initiating reskilling programs well in advance (achieve 83% of cost saving compared to external hiring) or upskilling early-career talent to meet this demand, the company can hire talent at a much lower cost compared to when the base pay would skyrocket as the demand for the talent increases.

Closing the Skills Gap with Real-time Labor Market Intelligence

The skills crisis in tech will continue to be a tough challenge. However, with proactive skills gap analysis powered by real-time labor market intelligence, talent acquisition teams can have a concrete plan to address it.

Real-time labor market intelligence enables a clear, actionable strategy to address this skills gap issue by transforming workforce planning from reactive to proactive.

By using real-time insights, organizations can:

Identify the skills gaps proactively – well in advance.
Identify and target the high priority business-critical skillsets for current and future business objectives.
Reskill and upskill the current workforce, as per internal and customer requirements.

The stakes are high: ignoring the skills gap risks stagnation and missed opportunities very soon. Conversely, investing in talent today ensures businesses are prepared to meet the demands of tomorrow. With such skilled, future-ready workforce, organizations can thrive in an ever-evolving global market—turning around the skills crisis into a competitive advantage. Real-time skills gap analysis and intelligence lay the foundation for the same.

Draup helps companies like Pepsico, Randstad, Vodafone, Paypal, Pfizer, Intuit and many more to understand such trends and plan early – factoring in the futuristic software engineering roles required to drive Gen AI led innovation and growth.

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