Companies of all sizes across every industry are becoming increasingly reliant on technology to run their business – every company is becoming a technology company. Simultaneously, technology replacement cycles are accelerating / shortening, and the digital infrastructure that in-house and / or outsourced IT staff build and maintain to optimize how employees utilize a myriad of technology tools is becoming increasingly complicated.
Meanwhile, as bad actors become more sophisticated, businesses are exposed to an increasing number of digital threats. Naturally these trends result in businesses’ rising demand for skilled technologists, but a broken education system is fueling a shortage of qualified talent. And not only are open positions left unfilled, but a failure to continuously upskill employees is resulting in widening skills gaps and employee dissatisfaction.
As C-Suites focus on strengthening their technology teams, we at Catalyst expect to see increased adoption of technology stack training tools which create and deliver training content, facilitate instruction & training, host sandbox environments and labs, and conduct and issue assessments, certifications, and accreditations. We expect these tools to be important across technology domains including Cybersecurity, Cloud, IT, Data Science and Security Awareness, amongst others.
Given Catalyst’s experience investing in and scaling numerous digital infrastructure and EdTech businesses, we believe this presents an exciting and actionable opportunity for growth equity investors. We look forward to meeting companies building in this space.