Deloitte has published a survey of its Technology Fast 500 CEOs. A major problem is the scarcity of talent:
This year's big story is people. Baby boomers are beginning to retire in droves and there simply are not enough young people to replace them. This problem is particularly severe in developed countries, where decades of declining birth rates and shifting education patterns are producing chronic talent shortages in science, technology, engineering, and healthcare--fields at the very heart of the Deloitte Technology Fast 500. This talent crisis--which is expected to last for decades--has the potential to make the dot-com talent crunch of the late 1990s look like a walk in the park.
CEOs in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 remain confident about their companies' near-term growth prospects. As was the case last year, more than 80 percent say they are "very confident" or "extremely confident" about sustaining their high level of growth over the next 12 months. Their biggest challenge will be "finding, hiring quality employees" as the factor that most contributed to their companies' growth, and over half of the respondents plan to expand their workforce by more than 25 percent in the next year.