Decoding No-Code and its Ability to Address Skill Shortage in IT

Quixy Editorial Team

August 9, 2023

This article was first published on Medium.

Do you know why most investors are interested in investing in IT startups and companies? The answer is simple. Since we humans have created machines, we can control their behavior to suit our needs and, consequently, influence the fate of the business.

This is also the reason why the biggest companies around the world primarily belong to the IT sector. Big Tech companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and Google have dominated the scene for quite some time now, and they are not likely to slow down any time soon.

But why are these companies at the top of their game? One reason behind the same is that these companies consist of highly creative people working for them.

Nowadays, the IT sector is involved in solving business problems in various sectors. Besides manual labour, there is perhaps no work around the world that can be automated entirely using IT solutions. So, the demand for IT skilled professionals is going through the roof.

But the disparity surrounding the demand-supply of skilled employees in IT is something that the world has failed to address as a whole.

Also Read: This is why you must use No-Code for IT Operations

Fact Check: A message from the market

A recent report by Nasscom-Zinnov speculated that India will likely face a shortage of close to 14–19 lakh tech professionals by 2026. As things stand, India needs 52 lakh techies as opposed to the 47 lakh that it currently employs.

The gap is extending at a greater pace regarding digital skills. India currently has 13 lakh digitally skilled people, and the demand suggests a gap of 5 lakhs to date.

Digital skills will be the cornerstone of the IT sector in the coming years, and no country can afford to lag in fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, etc.

However, India is not having this issue alone. According to Gartner’s emerging technology roadmap for large enterprises, 64% of participants believe there is a lack of talent available in the IT job market. Besides, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics has stated that there are six and a half times more job openings than talent available to fill them.

Moreover, studies from IDC have stated that monetary losses suffered due to reduced productivity due to IT skill shortage roughly tally up to $775 billion worldwide! Clearly, the IT skills shortage is not a provisional discrepancy but a profoundly rooted dilemma.

Also Read: Unleashing the potential of your existing IT systems!

What aids the skill shortage gap in IT?

Even though India has the second-highest number of tech graduates in the world (only behind China), it still faces a skill shortage in IT.

Consequently, it begs the question — why is there a skill shortage gap in the IT sector?

There are a variety of factors that are contributing to this issue. But here are a few issues that have more influence than the rest:

• Highly skilled employees are in short supply.
• The IT world is evolving much faster — even weighing heavily on skilled employees.
• Astronomical salary demands from skilled IT professionals make lives difficult for resource-constrained companies.
• The competition for skilled IT professionals is fierce in the market.

Besides, the demand for digitization of modern workspace has put companies in a rock and a hard place. Trapped in a cycle to become increasingly digital, companies have to turn to employees to provide digital solutions to address modern workspace problems. This, in turn, raises the demand for IT specialists even more.

The Consequences of the IT skill gap

All companies are affected differently by the issue of IT skill shortage. The lack of skilled people can delay digital transformation initiatives, and more essential tasks get postponed.

Around the world, the lack of skilled IT workers has also resulted in increased work pressure on the existing employees in smaller firms. Thus, the issue of work-life balance and work pressure is gaining traction with each passing day.

And it is not like the only victims of this are IT companies. There is a demand for IT skilled professionals across different sectors because even sectors like Pharmaceutical rely heavily on IT machinery.

Enter No-Code

To truly understand how No-code can help companies bridge the IT skill gap, one first needs to know what No-code development platforms are.

In layman’s terms, No-code platforms allow even less-skilled people to create application software to suit their demands.

For instance, suppose you are a budding blogger/ freelance who wants to assemble your writing samples within a particular domain name. Now, if you don’t know how to create a website, all you need to do is open WordPress, follow the instructions to make your blog, and bam! You will have a website with all your work samples.

No-code development platforms are quite similar to low-code development platforms, where the users are required to write low-level codes to execute a particular program.

However, no-code development platforms don’t require the users to write a single line of code. Users must select from a range of prebuilt template lists and get started with your offering.

For instance, WordPress comes with a range of website templates for the hosts to choose from. And the users are also granted the flexibility to change the templates at any time.

Besides, open-source software allows people to use their software to develop IT solutions for a given problem. Android is, perhaps, the most prominent example of open-source software that will enable people to build an android application using the information the platform provides.

Plugging the Holes

Now that we know what no-code is all about, how can no-code be used to address the skill shortage gap in IT?

Since the demand for IT solutions is skyrocketing significantly, companies can’t afford to lag in providing IT solutions to clients.

Conventional software development requires extensive knowledge of programming languages and hours of hands-on experience in coding, testing, and subsequent deployment of the software/ application.

And that’s where the unique selling proposition of no-code platforms lies. By eliminating all the hard work surrounding the development of an IT solution, no-code platforms are providing easy-to-use IT solutions to up-and-coming enterprises without making them compromise on quality.

Besides, no-code solutions do not require one organization to change its structure to a whole other way. No-code solutions can be deployed alongside an organization’s existing structures and processes.

The demand for skilled IT professionals is unlikely to decline; hence, innovative ways will always be required to deliver IT solutions to modern-day business requirements. So, reliance on IT professionals will be expensive and unfeasible in the long run.

The Slippery Slope

No-code has the ability to empower the users to bring their ideas to life, to innovate and most importantly to take action themselves. Businesses who are yet to explore the endless possibilities it offers will be left behind in this ever changing business era. Of course you don’t want to be one of them, hop on to this no-code ride!