82% of EMEA Tech Professionals Willing to Upskill for AI — Hays Report

Recruitment and human resources firm Hays has recently published a study report based on online surveys it conducted, gathering the views of 11,192 total respondents. Among them, 5,014 are tech professionals, including those on permanent, temporary, and freelance contracts, as well as unemployed professionals. Further, 6,178 respondents are employers from organizations of all sizes and sectors.

The study is based on past, current, and arising IT trends in 20 labor markets in which Hays is present across Continental Europe and the Middle East. When it comes to AI use versus guidance, the communication gap emerges as a significant concern, with 23% of these decision-makers uncertain about their organization's AI advancements.

In addition, only 30% of decision-makers state that AI is recommended in their organization, which lags considerably behind the 43% of all tech professionals currently utilizing AI, with a peak of 62% in the cloud computing skill area. 

This becomes more alarming when only 36% of the respondents affirm that their organizations have guidance or quality assurance for generating AI content.

Key findings from the report:

Regarding AI use cases based on all the locations, the survey reveals that 50% of the respondents use it to summarize or paraphrase a text, 47% use it as a communications assistant, 46% use AI to write or debug code, 39% use it for definitions and explanations, 26% for data analysis, and 25% for content creation.

Considering the benefits of AI from all EMEA locations combined, there has been a 64% increase in productivity and efficiency with AI. 42% of respondents have seen benefits in creativity and idea generation with AI, while 32% have reported a reduced risk of human error.

On evaluation of the extent of AI training and support received by tech professionals, it has been found that only 20% have received AI training to adopt AI at work. However, 82% of tech professionals in the EMEA locations are willing to participate in upskilling programs to adopt AI technologies. Also, 62% of the respondents are willing to change their profession or skill area in response to AI developments.