Half of Greek companies recruited IT staff

With the recruitment of technology-skilled staff, companies in Greece are responding to the enormous challenges posed by the pandemic. The environment of instability faced by Greek companies makes the need for an innovation-oriented and technologically trained workforce more urgent than ever.

Businesses, for their part, are responding to this need by hiring IT and technology savvy employees. : 53% of companies hired new employees in roles related to innovation or digital transformation in 2021.

In fact, despite the financial uncertainty, this percentage has increased by 11% compared to 2020. In terms of staff skills, analytical and innovative thinking is the most important skill that employees believe they need to support digital transformation (the same answer was given in 2020).

However, the existing staff does not seem to keep up with the speed with which the digital transformation is proceeding. For example, only 50% say they participated in a skills upgrade program in 2021.

Specialized departments

The country’s companies, in order to adapt to the new requirements, are changing their corporate structure, creating departments that deal exclusively with digital transformation. Most companies now have a division dedicated to digital transformation and innovation.

Now more than half of the companies in Greece (54%) answer that they have a corresponding department. In fact, the development that took place in just one year is impressive, as in 2020 58% of companies stated that they do not have a department that deals with digital transformation.

The above extremely interesting picture is captured by the annual report of Found.ation and EIT Digital, which records the views of the executives of Greek companies regarding the processes of digital transformation in the Greek market.

“Everyone recognizes that the digital transformation process has accelerated significantly from the pandemic, but the reality is that human resources have experienced the effects of this acceleration, while companies are still trying to adapt to a new era of work,” said the authors of the report “Digital Transformation. in Greece 2021-2022 ”.

Digital alert

According to the report’s findings, a significant percentage (78%) of Greek companies “run” projects today, which include digital transformation or are part of a broader DT strategy. In fact, more than 70% of respondents actively participate in these projects.

The pandemic contributed significantly to these excellent statistics on the absorption of digital transformation, with 97.7% saying they were accelerating digital switchover efforts to some extent. 65% of the answers range from “significant” to “superlative”.

Uncertainties

However, from the answers given to the questionnaire, it is clear that the role and essence of digital transformation is not clear to everyone. Executives associate digital transformation with more terms such as teleworking, rather than artificial intelligence or agile methodology.

However, they recognize that in 2022 Big Data will be the technology they would like to make the most of  in their business.