“The Gartner CIO Talent Planning for 2025 Survey reveals how leaders are adapting to persisting IT talent challenges while the demand for emerging skills grows more urgent. CIOs can use these insights to inform their talent strategy as they fortify themselves to meet the AI boom head-on.

Key findings

• Eighty-six percent of CIOs and senior IT leaders plan to increase IT staff levels in 2025 — a 7% average projected growth rate compared to 5% the year before.
• Skills gaps in AI, generative AI (GenAI) and cybersecurity persist, which rank as the top three skills preventing organizations from achieving their objectives.
• Nine out of 10 organizations have adopted or plan to adopt skills-based talent management to address talent and skills challenges. However, HR capacity and capability and the organization’s ability to collect and maintain the currency of employees’ skills data pose significant barriers.
• Hiring talent to close the skills gap is not working, requiring CIOs to investigate other talent approaches. The leading strategies for expanding the IT talent pipeline include upskilling and/or reskilling current employees and using AI to automate tasks or augment people resources.

Recommendations

• Respond proactively to evolving business demands by prioritizing a skills-based talent approach over traditional role-based hiring to quickly deploy adaptable teams and capitalize on emerging opportunities.
• Develop an upskilling and reskilling program that expands the IT talent pipeline by prioritizing filling skills gaps in AI, generative AI and cybersecurity skills, since these skills ranked highest in preventing organizations from achieving business objectives.
• Unlock AI’s full business potential by adopting outcome-driven learning practices to accelerate AI literacy across the enterprise.”

Gartner, CIOs Adopt Skills-Based Talent Strategies as IT Skills Gaps Linger, Jose Ramirez and Lily Mok, 28 April 2025.

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