Tag: mobile technology jobs

As the company works to rebuild itself, John Chen has explained that good talent is hard to keep.

BlackBerry CEO John Chen has now stated that it is not only difficult to find good mobile technology talent, but it is also very hard to keep it, which is clearly a challenge that the company is facing as it works on rebuilding.

This challenge becomes much harder when trying to hire on a last-minute basis, while avoiding lost time.

Chen spoke in a Thomson Reuters interview, last week, at the third annual Waterloo Innovation Summit in Canada. He explained that the main problem is to figure out how not to waste time at the last minute when talent is needed. In 2011, BlackBerry mobile technology had been an employer of 11,000 people in the Waterloo Region of Ontario, Canada.. However, today’s figure has dwindled to 2,700 workers in 2015.

During that period, a great deal of mobile technology talent was lost from the company as it tried to survive.

In the interview, Chen expressed that “We lost a lot of good people as a company. Not everybody is cut out to be a turnaround person or be in a turnaround environment. But if you can do it – I love it -it is fascinating, it is fabulous. The reward that comes at the end, the feeling of it, is hard to describe.”

Chen is now coming close to completing his second year at the helm of BlackBerry. The company had once been the leader in the smartphone category, but its slice of the market is now under 1 percent. The CEO’s strategy involves attracting and keeping the best talent in order to ensure the company’s return to success. In his opinion, this is the greatest challenge that the company is facing, as the goal is to change the turnaround plan from having been the smartphone manufacturing leader into being a company with a focus on internet, software, and services.

The BlackBerry CEO has said that the mobile technology market and its competition can’t be allowed to dictate the future of this category. Instead, he believes that it is up to the participants to carve out the path, and that requires time and patience to accomplish effectively.

Although there is no sure fire way to predict how the future employment market will appear, this is the common forecast.

When studying the current employment predictions for the 2014 IT job market, it is very challenging to get a grip on how things will look or what role mobile technology will play in those trends, except that it looks as though – regardless of the numbers – it will be that sector that will lead the way within the marketplace.

There will likely be some overall increases in hiring within the IT market as a whole.

That said, it is believed that while there will still be growth in IT in total, the increases will be cooling slightly next year when compared to previous years. The one area where there will still be quite a large demand for skills and experience is in mobile technology. There are still going to be techs required pretty much across the board, but it will be those with some expertise in the smartphone, tablet, and other wireless gadget field that will be the most highly in demand.

The mobile technology trends throughout this year should give some good ideas as to what next year has in store.

Although 2014 will hardly be a mirror of what was experienced this year in terms of hiring in various different categories of IT, there is still a great deal of hype around big data, cloud computing, and smartphone and tablet technologies that doesn’t appear to be going away. In fact, companies are still struggling to fill their positions with IT pros that have skills in those areas, which means that the demand should remain solidly increasing in those areas. This also means that for people who do have those skill sets, the salaries are still being pushed upward.

In terms of good IT talent in those specific hot areas, the demand of employers is quite outweighing the supply of good quality workers. Overall, it is the mobile technology area that will be the hottest in 2014. This includes a range of different parts of that field, from security to computing and data analysis.