Bobby Ford, vice president of HP: “Instead of going out looking for talent, I find it in my organization”

There are not many of them, but it is not difficult to find people trained in philosophy in the senior management of technology companies. Sergio Boixo, Google Quantum physicist, went through the classrooms of this discipline before becoming a reference in the quantum world. Bobby Ford, vice president of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HP) who also studied the meaning of human actions, must still resonate with what he learned from the Kantian principle that considers the person an end and not a simple means. And it helps him confront the global lack of professionals in the technological field and affirm: “I don’t think we have a shortage of talent, I think we have a shortage of experience. If this is my philosophy, instead of going out and looking for talent, what I do is find it within my organization, create options to give people from diverse and different backgrounds the opportunity to gain more experience.”

The problem that Ford alludes to, during his participation in CPX Vienna, is general. 78% of Spanish companies claim to have difficulties finding talent and incorporating the profiles they are looking for. The causes are found in the combination of the rapid growth of the technology industry and insufficient training in this area during the stages prior to the world of work. This market, already stressed, has finally broken with the emergence of artificial intelligence.

According to the director of Economics of the Cotec Foundation, who has presented a map of employment in this sector based on Social Security statistics, “the most technological branches grow in employment at a faster rate than the rest and, in the last decade , accumulate an increase of 48% in their membership volume compared to the 27% observed in the economy as a whole.”

According to Social Security data used by Cotec, 7.7% of affiliates in Spain work in technology-intensive jobs, a proportion still far from the European average (10.7%) and insufficient in a sector that represents 20% of the national GDP.

Juan Luis Moreno, director of innovation at The Valley business school, is committed to “creating, maintaining and attracting talent.” In this sense, Moreno advocates for professionals “capable of adapting to changes” and companies that “invest in training plans that guarantee correct management of internal talent, so that workers are empowered and not replaced.”.

Unlike Moreno, Bobby Ford is not in the field of training (he is the head of security at HP), so it is not assumed that he has a commercial interest in it. However, he agrees with the Spanish manager: “We can educate, teach and train people to create more talent than we actually take. “We are aggressive about being creators of talent and not takers of talent.”

However, for many small and medium-sized businesses, this solution is not valid. Daniel Gregg, founder of a family business specialized in programs for the management of health centers, laments: “I train my workers and a company with more economic capacity comes and steals them from me using checkbooks.”

Ford admits that salary has become a weapon in the battle for technological talent. “Wage inflation is a real thing. With that in mind, I am looking at how we can identify solutions.”

This “wage inflation,” which already distorts the market, is more serious among men and women. According to the latest Report on Employability and Digital Talent from the VASS foundations and the Autonomous University of Madrid, female technology workers earn 7.5% less than their male colleagues. Coupled with other factors, such as the lack of a defined professional career or mentors, it has meant that women only represent 23.47% of the sector. Increasing female participation in technological training pathways and reducing the persistent wage gap can provide a solution to the shortage of trained personnel.

“Although there has been notable progress in recent years, having only 23% of women in ICT profiles is clearly insufficient to achieve effective parity in the sector, something essential if we intend to take advantage of the great opportunity that the new paradigm represents. of digital transformation,” says Antonio Rueda, director of the VASS foundation. And he adds: “Fundamentally, we face two challenges; on the one hand, that women consider this sector as a good shelter within the new map of occupations, in continuous transformation; and on the other, that structural and motivational changes are carried out within the sector in organizations that allow them to avoid professional stagnation.”

Adela de Toledo, director of the technology company Pure Storage Iberia, summarizes the situation: “Any company that embarks on a digital transformation journey, for example, deploying AI throughout its organization, is going to encounter a skills shortage. There are simply not enough data scientists or other professionals with the relevant skills available to meet the demand, and those with the right skills are hard to come by and demand high salaries. “This is likely to remain a major problem for the next five to ten years.”

The solution for De Toledo coincides with that of the rest of the experts: “Organizations will not only have to invest heavily in talent through hiring, but also invest in the training of their existing workforce to develop more skills internally. If they don’t, they will only widen the skills gap in modern organizations.”

The board understands that training must be “accessible to all employees, including women.” And it is also committed to promoting female role models to attract female workers to this field and “challenge entrenched stereotypes”, as well as “address issues such as the reconciliation of work and family life and offer professional development opportunities”.

Maya Horowitz was going to be a psychologist until military service, mandatory in Israel, her country of origin, crossed her path. There she met and was trained in the world of computer defense and today she is vice president of research at the international cybersecurity company Check Point Software Technologies. “She changed my life and I understood that technology is for me too. “There is a lot to learn and it is about education, so that girls can develop the skills, and show them that there are women in this sector, that there is momentum.”

Francisco Criado, Horowitz’s colleague in one of the vice presidents of the same company, shares the idea of ​​”repositioning talent and teaching people.” He believes that the technological world is changing and that artificial intelligence allows profiles that were not so technical to be relocated within an organization as the machine assumes tasks that previously required very complex rules. “However, I don’t think it’s a quick fix,” he admits. “We are still going to suffer from a skills shortage for a long time and we will see where generative AI takes us, which is not going to solve it completely, but, in some cases, it may reduce the need for people in certain tasks. It may close the gap in the future.”