To misquote Ferris Bueller: Tech moves pretty fast.

One minute, IT pros are studying up for cloud certifications. The next minute, they’re exploring AI and asking chatbots to write haikus.

Emerging technologies, by definition, haven’t arrived yet—and neither have a ton of the experts.

In response to its expeditious nature, companies are showing interest in “upskilling,” or improving the skills of their own employees, rather than looking outside the organization for talent. According to end-of-year reports, like the consulting firm Protiviti’s Executive Perspectives on Top Risks for 2023 and 2032 survey, upskilling is in.

“Respondents are telling us how important it is to focus on the upskilling and reskilling of existing employees, because the talent they need is not walking the street,” said Jim DeLoach, Protiviti’s managing director at a December panel on corporate risk in New York City.

Training day. Companies have been investing in upskilling strategies for their employees. In July, Mercedes-Benz announced a $1.3 billion investment in training options, including a “Digital Readiness Programme” that offers instruction on technologies like machine learning, internet of things, and blockchain.

Forward-looking employers are offering in-house career opportunities, said Scott Dobrowski, VP of global corporate communications at Indeed.com.

“They’re kind of playing with internal experiments right now, to foster and support and give career opportunities in nontraditional ways to their talent, to help engage them and keep them retained,” Dobrowski told IT Brew.

Amazon’s “Surge2IT” program runs through topics ranging from networks and workstations to Linux command line. AT&T’s “Future Ready” initiative, begun in 2018, partners with universities and online learning platforms like Coursera.

Read more here.—BH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

2022 may have ended on a dour note for the tech industry, and its investors in particular, but IT remains more important than ever, with clear indications that everyone from corporate execs to governments view tech as a spending priority.

There’s no leaving the problems of yesteryear behind, though. Here are three of the biggest issues that seem likely to continue to face IT decision-makers as they careen into the unknowns of 2023.

Increasing cost of cyberattacks. By one estimate, the median cost of US cyber incidents was up 80% year over year in 2022. A recent Rubrik Zero Labs survey of more than 1,600 cybersecurity and IT leaders emphasized that the damage goes much further than a dollar sign.

Rubrik Zero Labs Head Steve Stone told IT Brew that cyberattacks increasingly require responses from the VP level to the C-suite. In the survey, 98% reported becoming aware of at least one attack in the year prior, with the average number of attacks within the year being 47. The consequences are “pretty profound,” Stone said, such as 96% of respondents reporting significant emotional or psychological impact, over one-third saying an incident resulted in leadership change, and 41% reporting their organizations suffered a loss of customers.

“If you put any other business metric and said this happened to 98% of organizations last year, and of those 98%, 41% had reputational damage, we would be talking about that nonstop,” Stone said.

Stalling data protection initiatives. Dell’s 2022 Global Data Protection survey of 1,000 IT decision-makers found around two-thirds lacked confidence in their anti-malware measures ability to recover business-critical data after a cyber incident. Zero-trust architecture is stalling, according to the report. While 91% said they were aware of or planning to deploy zero-trust architecture, just 12% actually had.

Keep reading here.—TM

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected]. Want to go encrypted? Ask Tom for his Signal.

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: $101,000. That’s the new median salary for IT professionals in North America. (ITPro Today)

Quote: “They left the front, side, and back doors open.”—Zach Edwards, independent privacy and security researcher, referring to the LAPD and their use of a leaky app called SweepWizard in coordinating raids (Wired)

Read: YouTube’s updated content guidelines discouraging profanity are upsetting the streaming site’s content creators. (The Verge)

Quick question: Is fear a helpful security motivator?

Yes, a little scare about the severity of security threats goes a long way
No, keep fear out of the security practices