And exit certified, we're delighted to announce the release of our 2023 state of the IT Industry Report. We surveyed 420 IT professionals in the United States across a wide variety of industries to bring you insights on IP training, skill shortages, IT training budgets and plans for upscaling through 2025.
I'm joined today by Victor Parkinson, who leads our education delivery organization. We both had some key takeaways from the report. Victor, why don't we start with something that you learned?
My first take away from the report is the skills gap will continue to increase in 2023. The IT skills gap is a major concern for many organizations
and IT professionals. In fact, over 50% of it leaders who participated in this survey predicted that the existing skills gap will widen further during the coming years through 2025. This suggests that organizations should expect to face a growing shortage of skilled IT professionals.
That's a good take away. Something I took away was that I keep training. Budgets are expected to grow in 2023, so despite concerns of an impending recession, IT leaders largely reported that they'll be increasing their IT training budgets. In 2023 / 60% of the surveyed companies plan to increase their budget for training. In 2023, a quarter of these companies plan to increase their budget by more than 10%.
We also found that the lack of skilled staff is the most dominant factor hindering digital transformation when it comes to the progression of digital transformation, 80% of IT leaders surveyed said they face barriers with their organization to achieve digital transformation goals, with the most dominant barrier being a lack of skilled staff.
Not surprisingly, we also learned that work pressure and budget constraints are among the top challenges in upscaling staff. As the demand for IT skills continues to grow, upscaling the existing workforce is becoming necessity for many organizations. However, companies still face challenges when upscaling staff most dominantly work pressure and budget constraints. 44.3% of IT leaders reported that IT teams are under great pressure to complete projects and have not been given the time during work hours that they need to devote to training.
Finally, we found that it leaders see an increase in staff productivity after receiving it training. There are various advantages to investing in technical training for both employees and businesses. In fact, more than 70% of respondents observe a significant increase in staff productivity after they had received training. Furthermore, an estimated 60% of respondents reported that their staff's job satisfaction increased after training. To view all of our insights, please download the 2023 state of IT Training report.