Talent Recruitment
How to Identify the Critical Tech Skills to Drive Growth
Tech organizations have bold vision but need teams with the skills to execute on it. Here’s how to identify and prioritize the skills that matter most.
October 16, 2025
Spur Growth with Critical Skills and Competencies
It’s not code or capital that’s holding back the tech sector. It’s people.
Twenty percent of global tech leaders in Korn Ferry’s Workforce 2025 Survey said that labor and skills shortages are having a significant impact on their business. That’s a wake-up call. Tech companies can’t afford to fall behind because they can’t find or keep the right talent.
The challenge is that tech evolves by the minute, but teams often don’t. New platforms launch. Architectures shift. AI becomes table stakes. But many tech organizations are trying to lead tomorrow’s growth with yesterday’s workforce.
Without the right people strategies, even the best tech strategies stall.
"Organizations can’t afford to let their people strategies lag behind their tech strategies. Workforce capability must evolve at the same pace as innovation—if not faster." says Karin Visser, Vice President, Org, Work & Reward, Korn Ferry Institute.
Here’s how to identify the skills that will drive your next wave of growth.
How to Uncover Critical Skills: Step-by-Step
1 Connect Vision to Capability
Every organizational transformation begins with a vision. Whether you're looking to integrate generative AI, modernize legacy platforms, or secure your digital assets, the capabilities you need will differ dramatically.
Too often, organizations define talent needs based on static job titles or generic role descriptions. But innovation doesn’t come from hiring a “cloud engineer.” It comes from understanding what that engineer needs to build, lead, or scale within your specific strategic context.
That’s why the first step isn’t identifying skills. It’s identifying the outcomes you want to achieve.
Once your strategic objectives are clear, you can map the capabilities required to deliver them. For example:
- A company prioritizing AI-driven customer support may need prompt engineers, AI QA leads, and conversational UX designers.
- An enterprise focused on cybersecurity resilience may need cloud security architects, threat detection analysts, and governance experts.
A company focused on optimizing the customer experience through data-driven personalization may need capabilities in real-time analytics, data governance, machine learning operations (MLOps), and customer journey design, blending technical acumen with behavioral insights.
Our Talent Trends 2025 survey revealed that 31% of respondents anticipate talent acquisition aligning more closely with business and transformation goals over the next five years.
Shifting from hiring for roles to building for outcomes brings your people strategy in sync with your business goals.
2 Audit What You Have—And What You Don’t
Understanding your current state is just as important as defining your future goals. A robust skills audit helps you answer two questions: Where are we strong? And where are we vulnerable?
Look across your tech stack, project portfolio, and delivery pipeline. Use skill matrixes, performance data, and direct input from team leads to assess both technical depth and cross-functional agility.
The State of Tech Talent 2025 Report by the Linux Foundation found that many tech organizations are understaffed in hard skills such as:
- AI/Machine Learning (68%)
- Cybersecurity and compliance (65%)
- FinOps and cost optimization (61%)
- Cloud computing (59%)
- Platform engineering (56%)
Don’t stop at assessing hard skills. Innovation relies just as much on adaptability, psychological safety, and communication. Many tech organizations also lack the soft skills needed to collaborate across silos or manage change effectively.
A good audit should expose individual gaps and systemic patterns. For instance, are you consistently over-relying on a handful of experts? Are critical capabilities concentrated in just one team or region?
These insights form the basis for smarter tech workforce upskilling strategies and targeted capability-building.
3 Involve the People Closest to the Work
Skill gaps often don’t show up on spreadsheets. They show up in missed deadlines, duplicated efforts, and internal friction.
That’s why it's essential to go beyond HR data and engage with the people who experience these gaps every day. Interview your product leads, engineering managers, and operations heads. Ask:
- Where are projects stalling?
- What skills are you improvising around?
- Where do you see the most friction between teams?
These conversations often reveal “invisible” capabilities—like mentoring, translating technical work into business outcomes, or navigating legacy systems—that are critical to business success.
They also build buy-in. When you co-create your talent priorities with the people delivering on them, you create shared ownership for closing those gaps.
4 Triage with a View to Impact
There may always be some skill gaps to fill, but not every gap is strategically important or urgent.
Ask questions like:
- Where are the gaps slowing your people down or holding your business back?
- Which missing capabilities put product speed, customer trust, or long-term resilience at risk?
- Which gaps create friction today or could cause significant challenges tomorrow?
As you prioritize, consider the size of the gap and the ROI of different ways to close it. Will you need to upskill or reskill current workers or hire new talent? Could you potentially borrow the talent needed to reach specific business goals?
Explore Multiple Talent Strategy Options
Once you know what you need and where the gaps lie, it’s time to act. Here’s the key: the solution won’t come from one channel. Korn Ferry advises a diversified tech talent approach:
- Build internal talent by investing in immersive learning, mentorship, and inclusive development programs. Technical training is undeniably effective for retention.
- Buy talent when speed or specialization is essential. This is especially relevant in high-stakes areas such as AI ethics, cybersecurity, or edge computing, where time-to-impact matters.
- Borrow expertise by engaging contractors, consultants, or external specialists. This gives you agility without long-term overhead.
- Bot your way into efficiency by automating routine tasks and augmenting teams with AI-driven tools.
This strategy gives you the flexibility to build what’s unique, buy or borrow what’s scarce, and automate what’s repeatable, creating a workforce that’s not just skilled, but scalable.
Why Skills Identification Matters Now
The future of tech work is not about man vs. machine. It’s about human potential plus technology.
The tech organizations that succeed won’t be the ones with the biggest tools. They’ll be the ones with the most adaptable people.
The ability to learn is more important than what you already know. That’s why the most future-ready tech leaders are shifting from static org charts to dynamic tech skills ecosystems built on curiosity, learning, and shared purpose.
Building a Skills-Based Future
Knowing the skills you need is just the start.
For tech leaders, identifying the capabilities that drive innovation is essential. But becoming a truly skills-based organization takes more than a list of competencies. It takes a shift in mindset.
From workforce planning and hiring to performance and development, every part of your talent strategy needs to reflect what your tech teams are actually solving for.
If you’re ready to build teams around what really moves your tech business forward, explore our guide to Skills-Based Hiring and Talent Management.
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