The Fallacy of Workforce Development
Enterprises are getting around it.
The quantum community evangelizes that workforce development is needed, but I recently concluded that it is not. Not from an end user standpoint, anyway. In the near future, IQT Research will publish a report that does not focus on this issue, yet nonetheless reveals it.
The conclusion makes sense, if I do say so myself, from the perspective of a large enterprise. If you have 100,000 employees, how many of them really need to understand quantum computing? At most, you currently have a small team investigating use cases. You don’t have anything in production.
Therefore, you’re probably getting around the issue of workforce development in several ways:
You’re partnering with quantum computing companies.
You’re using high-level software.
You’re engaging consortia.
You’re supporting education.
You’re participating in competitions.
You’re working with, and sometimes sharing, postdoctoral researchers.
For the most part, large enterprises are expanding their access to talent, rather than developing it in-house. There is no need to develop today’s workforces, and there may not be any need in the future either. They’ll continue partnering with quantum computing companies and consortia, they’ll use the increasingly higher-level software that will become available, and they’ll hire out of the universities and competitions they’re sponsoring. There is no indication that anyone will want a workforce with an entry-level understanding of quantum computing. No one even mentioned upskilling, even though that’s happening.
Stay subscribed. I’ll let you know when the report has been published.
Image generated by an AI model provided by Microsoft Copilot.