Interview Finding
solutions to the skills gap in IoT
Everything is becoming ‘smarter’ and more ‘connected’ which brings a whole world of new technology that engineers need to be familiar with. But what happens when a skills gap emerges within IoT businesses that threatens to derail the market’s momentum? CIE editor, Amy Wallington talks to Mike Bell, EVP Devices and IoT at Canonical to find out
A
recent study conducted by Canonical reveals that business IoT strategy is being hampered by a major skills gap — with 68 per cent struggling to find employees with relevant IoT expertise. In the electronics sector, while demand for hardware designers remains stable, 71 per cent of IoT professionals identify embedded software development as one of the most needed skills in the IoT age, yet a third say that they are struggling to recruit. While the apparent struggle to hire embedded software developers in the IoT sector might be surprising to some, Mike Bell saw it coming: “Some aspects of the research findings surprised me, but it also confirmed a lot of the assumptions and theories we thought were true. Actually having the statistical evidence now to say ‘yes these are the challenges’ is really useful.” According to Mike, one of the primary
Mike Bell 12 October 2017
reasons for this skills gap is because of the change in the end point. He says: “When you think of a traditional web-based application it’ll have a browser and a well-defined set of ways of communicating with the server. You
Components in Electronics
don’t really have to worry too much about it because it isn’t complex; you know that as long as someone’s web browser supports the right technology set the application will run. But IoT goes much deeper. Suddenly you have to start looking at hardware, where there are multiple options, and the operating system. Device security becomes a complete end to end challenge where you can’t just focus on the end point anymore, you have to make security part of the entire underlying design. Traditional developers have some of the required skills required but IoT’s complexity demands more and it is this that creates the current skills gap.”
The IoT compounds the skills gap many other key emerging technology areas are already facing. “Skills in key areas like big data analytics and artificial intelligence are a problem with or without IoT. When you put IoT in the mix, it aggravates the entire situation.” “We recently met with a large Chinese technology company. We were talking to them about their IoT strategy and, for first time, they realised that the only way for them
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