It seems counterintuitive to find that Spain, as one of the European countries with the worst unemployment level, at 3 million, is reckoned to be forfeiting an income of 14.5 billion euros a year due to a shortage of talent .

The technology sector stands to lose the most here. The European Commission has announced that it expects the skills shortage in the ICT sector to be 500,000 by 2020. Furthermore, a study conducted by Capgemini Consulting in collaboration with the MIT Center for Digital Business shows that 77% of companies consider the shortage of digital skills to be the main obstacle for carrying out their digital transformation.

Well aware of the scale of this problem,  AMETIC, Spain’s digital employers’ association, has organized the 2^nd Forum for the Development of Digital Talent in Spain (II Foro Alianza por el Desarrollo de Talento Digital en España), with the aim of bringing to wider notice  the new skills sought by ICT organizations and other sectors immersed in their digitalization process.

Isabel Celaá, acting Minister of Education and Professional Training, opened the Forum and stressed the importance of digitalization as a sine qua non of ongoing progress in the economy and in education. Celaá put the figures on the table: 90% of future jobs will call for digital skillsets, while contrasting this with Spanish firms’ current difficulties in finding ICT specialists. Pedro Mier, AMETIC President, likewise referred to the need for digital talent in today’s society and the moot point now is how to generate enough top-quality talent to meet the challenges being posed by digitalization.

The forum brought together sector high-ups, businesspersons, politicians and government officials, as well as companies, business schools and universities. As in the first forum, GMV sponsored AMETIC’s initiative, and Crescencio Lucas, Head of GMV’s Managed Services Division took part in the panel discussion “The present and future of professional skills”. GMV is a technology company that bases its success on the talent of its 2000 professionals. This talent is the sum of two concepts, the first relating to how much the person knows, what he or she knows how to do professionally, what training he or she has, and the second to “the adaptation capacity”, understood as the will and keenness to learn, flexibility, motivation and a huge passion for technology.