LOL "Employees are underutilizing resources for upskilling" that is some serious spin. How about Employees are given enough work for 3 people while also expected to 'figure out some training to do'.
"Skill gap" in this context means that an employee lacks a skill that the job needs/requires. It is from the employer's point of view that the employee lacks a skill.
The top groups are Cybersecurity, Cloud computing, data storage, network infrastructure, and social networking tech(?). This seems like a decent number of employees didn't know anything about how to setup their machines or save documents to the cloud.
(Perhaps more optimistically some places realized that even their long time SysAdmins have never used cloud providers :/)
In my experience most people have extremely sensitive work environments even in IT and sometimes even more in IT (with the exception of the neckbeards that do everything themselves.) The average IT helpdesk isn't so much tech savvy as they are following a script/directions. WFH means every problem now has to be solved remotely which means every script is out of date (doesn't mention a VPN or O365 BYOD specific policies) combined with having to walk user's through checking things over video calls... it quickly becomes a nightmare.
The front line employees are not going to have the time to use educational/upskill tools. The more experienced employees don't want to waste their time watching videos on LinkedIn.
Historically I definitely do think that there were a lot of engineers who upskilled by sticking their nose into random discussions, peering over shoulders, pestering senior devs at lunch, and other social activities.
I am very concerned that the socialization of computing, the wide skills that go into IT beyond simply whatever the ticket in front of you is, are going to be- well not lost, but- much harder to develop & find. This reduces the fun, interesting, social side of IT, & emphasized the dry, mechanistic, industrialized aspects of computing.
They just mean juniors are having a harder time picking up skills from more senior people who have already been in the industry for a while because it's harder in a remote environment.
