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Gartner: 81% of CIOs Expect to Grow Their IT Team in 2023

According to a recent survey by Gartner, 80% of large enterprise (LE) CIOs plan to increase their IT headcount in 2023.

Only 14% expect their IT staff to decrease and 5% expect their headcount to remain the same.

"Attracting and retaining technology talent remain critical areas of concern for CIOs," said Jose Ramirez, Sr. Principal Analyst at Gartner. "Even with advances in AI, Gartner predicts that the global job impact will be neutral in the next several years due to enterprise adoption lags, implementation times and learning curves."

Only 4% of CIOs surveyed reported AI-augmented worker as a resource producing technology work today.

Why CIOs Plan to Increase IT Headcount in 2023

"Enterprises have undertaken various digital initiatives over the past two years, with operational excellence and customer or citizen experience being the most popular," said Ramirez. "Still, these initiatives often do not meet enterprise needs quickly enough."

67% of LE CIOs plan to grow their IT headcount in 2023 by at least 10% to support their enterprise’s digital initiatives.

While CIOs are looking to expand their IT teams, many have faced roadblocks in hiring due to economic conditions. Due to prevailing economic volatility, 41% of LE CIOs report slow hiring for IT roles, 35% report decreasing overall IT budget and 29% report an IT hiring freeze.

"CIOs are taking proactive steps to combat economic volatility by relaxing geographic and role requirements to expand their IT talent pipeline," said Ramirez. "Some organizations have found success by hiring early-career technologists and providing upskilling opportunities to fill critical technology needs."

The survey also found that full-time equivalents (FTEs) do the majority of tech work in the enterprise. Full-time IT employees perform 56% of the work, while technology advancements such as automation and AI-augmented work account for just over 9% of work today.

"This reliance on FTEs to meet the demands of digital transformation explain why LE CIOs plan to increase IT headcount in 2023," said Ramirez.

How CIOs Plan to Upskill IT Talent

CIOs cite cybersecurity, cloud platforms and customer/user experience as the three most critical technical skills in 2023

With the growing demand for IT talent, the most important candidate qualities LE CIOs look for during the hiring process are having the requisite technical skills, soft skills (e.g., communication, relationship management) and cultural fit. LE CIOs cite cybersecurity, cloud platforms and customer/user experience as the three most critical technical skills in 2023.

Nearly half of LE CIOs plan to invest in training programs to upskill and reskill IT staff to ensure teams have the relevant roles, skills and capacity to meet enterprise objectives. Forty-six percent of CIOs also plan to establish fusion teams, and the same percentage plan to automate workflow to free up IT time.

"Recruiting the right IT expertise takes time and planning, especially for skills in architecture, cybersecurity, cloud computing and agile software development," said Ramirez. "Ensure that IT has relevant roles, skills and capacity to meet enterprise objectives. This may require embracing a blended workforce model of IT and business domain roles."

Methodology: The Gartner survey was conducted from October through November of 2022 among 501 respondents, 182 of which were LE CIOs in North America, EMEA and APAC region. The LE segment consists of enterprises with a total annual revenue of $1B USD or more.

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Gartner: 81% of CIOs Expect to Grow Their IT Team in 2023

According to a recent survey by Gartner, 80% of large enterprise (LE) CIOs plan to increase their IT headcount in 2023.

Only 14% expect their IT staff to decrease and 5% expect their headcount to remain the same.

"Attracting and retaining technology talent remain critical areas of concern for CIOs," said Jose Ramirez, Sr. Principal Analyst at Gartner. "Even with advances in AI, Gartner predicts that the global job impact will be neutral in the next several years due to enterprise adoption lags, implementation times and learning curves."

Only 4% of CIOs surveyed reported AI-augmented worker as a resource producing technology work today.

Why CIOs Plan to Increase IT Headcount in 2023

"Enterprises have undertaken various digital initiatives over the past two years, with operational excellence and customer or citizen experience being the most popular," said Ramirez. "Still, these initiatives often do not meet enterprise needs quickly enough."

67% of LE CIOs plan to grow their IT headcount in 2023 by at least 10% to support their enterprise’s digital initiatives.

While CIOs are looking to expand their IT teams, many have faced roadblocks in hiring due to economic conditions. Due to prevailing economic volatility, 41% of LE CIOs report slow hiring for IT roles, 35% report decreasing overall IT budget and 29% report an IT hiring freeze.

"CIOs are taking proactive steps to combat economic volatility by relaxing geographic and role requirements to expand their IT talent pipeline," said Ramirez. "Some organizations have found success by hiring early-career technologists and providing upskilling opportunities to fill critical technology needs."

The survey also found that full-time equivalents (FTEs) do the majority of tech work in the enterprise. Full-time IT employees perform 56% of the work, while technology advancements such as automation and AI-augmented work account for just over 9% of work today.

"This reliance on FTEs to meet the demands of digital transformation explain why LE CIOs plan to increase IT headcount in 2023," said Ramirez.

How CIOs Plan to Upskill IT Talent

CIOs cite cybersecurity, cloud platforms and customer/user experience as the three most critical technical skills in 2023

With the growing demand for IT talent, the most important candidate qualities LE CIOs look for during the hiring process are having the requisite technical skills, soft skills (e.g., communication, relationship management) and cultural fit. LE CIOs cite cybersecurity, cloud platforms and customer/user experience as the three most critical technical skills in 2023.

Nearly half of LE CIOs plan to invest in training programs to upskill and reskill IT staff to ensure teams have the relevant roles, skills and capacity to meet enterprise objectives. Forty-six percent of CIOs also plan to establish fusion teams, and the same percentage plan to automate workflow to free up IT time.

"Recruiting the right IT expertise takes time and planning, especially for skills in architecture, cybersecurity, cloud computing and agile software development," said Ramirez. "Ensure that IT has relevant roles, skills and capacity to meet enterprise objectives. This may require embracing a blended workforce model of IT and business domain roles."

Methodology: The Gartner survey was conducted from October through November of 2022 among 501 respondents, 182 of which were LE CIOs in North America, EMEA and APAC region. The LE segment consists of enterprises with a total annual revenue of $1B USD or more.

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The Latest

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ...