Hiring & Reskilling Cloud Migration Specialist talent for accelerating Cloud adoption

“The global Cloud Computing services market is projected to be worth USD 830 Bn in 2026, growing at a CAGR of 17.5%.”

The uninterrupted deliveries of digital products and services during COVID-19 were only possible due to the rapid adoption of Cloud by a significant number of enterprises at scale, resulting in increasing demand for Cloud Migration talent.

With the growing interest in bridging the digital gap during the pandemic, enterprises started investing in Cloud to accelerate the new generation of digital-first businesses. As of today, 9 out of 10 organizations have expedited their cloud adoption and increased cloud investments.

Cloud Computing Market: An Overview

As global enterprises shift from Legacy Infrastructure to Cloud Infrastructure, Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) are prepared to take on the largest market share of Cloud Computing.

In large-scale adoption, the E-commerce industry has topped the charts for significant Cloud adoption for various use cases involving complex development and architecture functions. In regulated sectors such as BFSI and Telecom, private Cloud is primarily preferred by organizations but has been slower owing to specific directives and apprehensions over Cloud-security.

Cloud Talent Analysis

As organizations increasingly move to Cloud, the requirement for a robust and diverse Cloud team with specific migration skills is felt across industries. Organizations will require diverse cloud talent since each role is vital in executing Cloud migration at various stages.

Some of the emerging job roles with Cloud Migration include:

• Cloud Migration Specialist – They define and build the business case for Cloud migration and are witnessing a huge demand due to their criticality in the Cloud migration process.
• Cloud Infrastructure Engineer – They deliver end-to-end infrastructure management solutions in a cloud environment and improve operations monitoring, cloud coding, and scripting.
• Cloud Developer – They enable rapid development and deployment of software, continuous integration/delivery, automated quality checks, and operational metrics.
• Cloud Architect – They design architectures and build system components to move and build new applications in the Cloud.
• Cloud Support Engineer – They help customers stream, store, and process vast amounts of data in the Cloud and leverage this data to produce business insights.

In the sections further discussed, our focus will be on the “Cloud Migration Specialist” job role, and how to hire or develop this talent in-house.

Location Intelligence for Cloud Migration roles

Targeted hiring strategies are imperative for companies across industries to employ quality Cloud talent. A thorough analysis of 60+ global locations for Cloud talent indicated that India ranks first with the highest talent availability, close to 27% of the talent pool, followed by the USA, UK, and Australia.

Specific locations such as Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR, and London are highly favorable for cost-effective hiring of ‘Cloud Migration Specialist’ job roles.

Demand-Supply Gap and IT disruption

Due to a substantial increase in the adoption of Cloud by global enterprises, the demand for Cloud talent is expected to drastically increase in the next few years. However, this demand will be met by a talent shortage due to the pre-existing demand-supply gap in the Cloud computing market.

USA amounts for the highest demand of Cloud talent, followed by China, India, and Germany, and all of these countries face a significant shortage in supply of this talent.

Parallelly, increased Cloud adoption is disrupting the traditional IT workforce of companies and making their skills redundant. Traditional IT workflows such as infrastructure maintenance, database administration, and system support are being replaced by Virtualized data centers, Cloud administrators, and real-time computing and support.

To prevent traditional IT talent from becoming redundant over the years, organizations can consider reskilling as a method to use this disruption as an opportunity for in-house talent development.

Please download the full report to access detailed insights on Demand-Supply Gap and IT disruption

Reskilling Case Study: Reskilling a System Administrator into a Cloud Migration Specialist

Reskilling the disrupted IT workforce for Cloud job roles can be an effective strategy for companies to meet the unmet hiring demand of Cloud talent and simultaneously provide viable career paths to IT talent.

Organizations will need to follow a detailed reskilling framework to attain the best results. A sample reskilling framework consists of:

• Skills breakdown of the disrupted role and skills required for the new position
• Skills gap analysis between the starting and desired role
• Analysis of feasible transitions based on relevant reskilling parameters
• Selection of suitable learning modules to bridge the skills gap

Let us try preparing a reskilling path from a System Administrator to a new-age Cloud Migration Specialist.

In a timeframe of 4-6 months, a System Administrator would be transformed into a Cloud Migration Specialist following the custom reskilling path discussed above.

With further commercialization and market penetration, Cloud Computing is expected to heavily disrupt the existing skills of the IT workforce across all experience levels very shortly.

Reskilling is the need of the hour considering the exponential demand-supply gap in Cloud talent, and Enterprises that choose to move with custom reskilling would be less likely to face a talent shortage in the coming future.

Draup is an AI-powered talent intelligence platform that delivers HR leaders with data-backed insights into the global talent pool, cost modeling, and reskilling pathways suitable to manage talent faster and drive company-wide reskilling initiatives or hire quality talent.