We’re evolving towards a digital world. Erm, no. Let me start over. We live in a digital world. And things around us will only become more digital. Our smartphones are more and more becoming the center of our lives. We make phone calls, send txt messages, FB, watch movies, buy stuff, book holidays, taxi rides and hotel rooms. We manage our finances, track and share our sports activities, we navigate to any location, we leave a trail of where we were ... all with one device.

 Whether we realise it or not, this device that fits nicely in our hands is backed by an immense, ever-expanding network of applications, servers, connections and infrastructure. Things that need to be continuously developed and maintained. To do that, requires people. And that’s where we have a problem in Belgium. Our workforce isn’t growing fast enough and isn’t retrained fast enough. We still have people sitting in un employment. Unless we take action now and activate our workforce at an increased rate, we won’t be able to keep up with the digital pace. I guess however, Belgium’s not the only country struggling to fill all job openings.

According to Agoria (the umbrella organisation of all Belgian technology-based companies), more jobs are appearing than disappearing (+0,9% per year) while the workforce is growing only slowly (+0,3% per year). On top of this, digitalisation is changing the content of every job; for some limited, for others quite radical. Unless we take action, digitalisation and economic dynamics will result in more than half a million unfilled posts by 2030, in Belgium alone.

Expert jobs require expert people. Keep people within their focus, they’ll perform better and will be more engaged. People sometimes assume that data center housing is an IT job. It’s not, it’s an engineer’s. Data center construction and maintenance require expert knowledge on electrical power and circuitry, engines/generators, cooling and heating, architecture, security, energy efficiency... So why would you want to train an IT person to do an engineer’s job? It's a completely different skill set. Anyway, you could use that IT person to focus on IT projects. That’s what you hired her/him for in the first place.

And why would you want to do it yourself inhouse. Besides the skill set, a data center that has an uptime of over 99,9%, requires a state-of-the-art infrastructure which by itself is a huge investment. We already made that investment, so why not outsource yours and benefit from the economies of scale? That way, you can also save on office space, which you will need for your future staff.

Be The Change - Shaping the Future of Work is a campaign by Agoria. Would you like to find out how our workforce - and you - will be impacted by the digitalisation of our lives; will you be the change? Then visit the Be The Change landing page.