Survey says Thai IT workforce has room to grow

Thailand’s IT-skilled workforce is considered good enough to catch up with emerging technologies like cloud and big data, according to a survey conducted by a local IT research and training firm.

But the survey also found that policymakers need to attract more young developers to work in IT to avoid the problem of a skilledworkforce shortage in the future, especially as the country moves toward Thailand 4.0.

“Local IT professionals have the ability to catch up with new emerging technologies in term of programming languages and technology frameworks, especially cloud computing and big data analytics,” said Thanachart Numnonda, executive director of IMC Institute.

The ICT workforce capability survey was conducted in early May among 255 respondents, ranging from IT professionals and academics working in IT, finance, telecom and education. According to the survey Java, PHP and C# are the top three most popular programming languages, followed by Pythom.

But new languages like Swift for mobile development and R for data science and machine learning remained relatively unpopular, with only 5.5% and 3.1% of respondents, respectively, knowing them.

In addition, cloud computing is also quite well accepted as 56% of respondents says they use cloud, with Google, Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure being the top three most popular cloud platform services.

But Mr Thanachart said in order to attract more investment from foreign firms, in particular global cloud service providers, policymakers have to invest more in international internet connectivity to be on par with peers in Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and Japan.

“International links are crucial for cloud adoption growth and usage,” he said.

Mr Thanachart said the survey also found that web service, mobile applications and agile software are the most popular emerging tech frameworks.

“We noticed that the respondents have worked, on average, 1-5 years as IT professionals, compared with 10-15 years in the global market,” he said, adding that this experience shortfall should compel the government to attract more people to join the IT workforce to drive the country’s digital economy.

Mr Thanachart said blockchain is another technology they have to watch as it has the potential of disrupting the financial services industry.

The global marketplace for blockchain is forecast to reach US$ 7.74 billion (264.2 billion baht) in 2024, up from $604 billion in 2016.

In Thailand, he said blockchain can be used in various industries, including manufacturing, insurance and banking.