The tech skills gap is something that gets brought up again and again, as organisations lament their struggles to find talented developers, engineers and security professionals. The problem, so they claim, is that there just aren’t enough potential employees in the industry to meet demand for these positions.

But are companies struggling to fill roles because there aren’t enough qualified candidates, or does the real reason have more to do with hiring practises, company culture and attitudes towards certifications? This week, we’re taking a look at the supposed causes of the skills gap, and why companies are thinking about tech skills in the wrong way.

To find out more about this and other issues, head to http://bit.ly/ITPP-skills.

Floppy disks. Fax machines. Cassette tapes. All are commonly thought of as obsolete technology, but are they really that outdated, or have their applications and use-cases simply become more niche?

In this episode, we take a look at the concept of obsolescence, asking what truly qualifies a technology as being past its sell-by date and exploring why some of the oldest technology out there still has a place in modern business.

For more information about the topics in this week's episode, head to http://bit.ly/ITPP-obsolete.

Software is eating the world, and the developers who build it have been called ‘the new kingmakers’ – but creating a truly engaged dev team is about much more than just finding people who are able to hammer out code. The best development organisations are made up of brilliant, passionate individuals for whom programming isn’t just a job, but a craft.

In this episode of the IT Pro Podcast, we’re joined by Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, to discuss whether old devs can learn new tricks, how Raspberry Pi’s development team has grown beyond his expectations, and why the best developers are the ones that make your decisions for you.

For more insight into everything we've spoken about in this episode, head to http://bit.ly/ITPP-craft.

For the past several years, advances in fields such as 5G, IoT, autonomous vehicles and AI processing have promised to unlock major new innovations for civic planning and public sector management. Technology vendors and local governments alike have laid out visions for glittering, high-tech utopias where next-generation systems manage everything from traffic flow to collecting the bins.

For the past year, however, COVID has reduced cities up and down the country to veritable ghost towns, stripped of their usual hustle and bustle. In a post-pandemic world, can the same ideas be turned to making COVID-safe cities, or is the dream of the smart city no longer feasible? This week we’re joined by staff writer Keumars Afifi-Sabet to talk about the future of smart cities.

For more information on the topics covered in this week's episode, head to http://bit.ly/ITPP-dream.

On 31 December 2020, the UK’s Brexit transition period came to a close, taking us firmly out of the EU. Many issues have been raised over the flow of goods between Britain and its former partners, but the flow of data is a different matter altogether. Data has become an intrinsic part of modern business and with previous rules on international data transfers now at risk of irrelevancy, many organisations are considering how they can adjust their data practises to avoid falling foul of regulators.

With many elements of international data law still up in the air pending various legal cases and policy decisions, we’re joined by Bart Willemsen, VP at Gartner specialising in privacy, to discuss the current regulatory environment and how businesses can prepare themselves for any changes that might be on the way.

For more information on everything we're spoken about in this episode, head over to http://bit.ly/ITPP-Transfer.

Healthcare has always been a vital industry, but for obvious reasons, it’s more important now than it’s ever been. Hospitals are being faced with an environment in which they must do all they can to limit physical contact, and technology is playing a key role in making that possible. On top of the COVID-19 crisis, however, healthcare organisations still have to grapple with everyday IT challenges like improving operational efficiency and maintaining their security.

To discuss these issues, and how the healthcare sector is using technology to tackle them, we’re joined this week by Craig York, CTO on Milton Keynes University Hospital Foundation Trust, and member of the IT Pro Panel.

For more information, head to http://bit.ly/ITPP-healthcare.

Migrating to a new technology is always challenging, but it's even more daunting when your estate includes 2,000 engineers, 10,000 applications and 50 million lines of code. That was the challenge faced by FinTech powerhouse Bloomberg when it made the transition from JavaScript to TypeScript, but with the migration process now well underway, the organisation is reaping big benefits in the hygiene and maintainability of its codebase.

This week, we're joined by Thomas Chetwin, the co-chair of Bloomberg's JavaScript guild, to learn more about why the company made the switch, the challenges it faced during the process and why everyone should be using TypeScript.

To find out more, head to http://bit.ly/ITPP-TypeScript.

Of all the sectors impacted by the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the air travel industry has been among the hardest hit. With international travel highly restricted and video conferences set to supplant a large amount of business meetings for the foreseeable future, the airline industry is having to re-assess its flight path.

Rather than sitting on its hands, however, the industry has been using this downtime to spin up a number of digital transformation initiatives, in the hope that when it does re-emerge, its operations will be more efficient, more cost-effective and more environmentally friendly. Joining us this week to discuss the sector’s plans is Pascal Buchner, CIO of the International Air Transport Association.

Head to http://bit.ly/ITPP-Air for more information on everything we've spoken about in this episode.

For those of us who don’t get excited over teraflops and motherboard specifications, hardware is just something that we use to get our jobs done, and up until last year, most of us probably didn’t think too much about the devices we use at work. COVID-19, however, threw all of that into sharp relief, as mass remote working suddenly made having the right hardware setup a crucial enabler.

Laptops, webcams and headsets were suddenly a hot commodity, and moving to a non-office environment exposed the cracks in many organisations’ client-device strategy. In this episode of the IT Pro Podcast, we take a look at how we use devices, the impact of the pandemic, and what we’ve learned about our own hardware preferences.

Head to http://bit.ly/ITPP-Hardware for links to everything we've spoken about in this episode.

The last 12 months have been something of a struggle, but with the strange and miserable year that was 2020 now behind us, it’s time to look forward at what 2021 has in store. As the dust settles and life begins to return to normal, we’re going to have to reckon with the ramifications of the momentous events 2020 brought, including the election of a new president, the continuation of remote working, and the effects of Brexit – whatever those may be.

We’re sure to see some significant shifts throughout the IT world and 2021 is likely to hold a lot of upheaval. In this episode, we take a look at the year to come, make our predictions for what themes and trends it will bring, and share what we’re most looking forward to.

To find out more about the topics we've spoken about in this episode, head to http://bit.ly/ITPP-lookahead