Companies are hiring for IT jobs faster than they are planning. Titles rise and fall, tools change quickly, and every vendor claims their tech solves everything.
Kaylin Dingle, senior account manager at EQPlus
Decision-makers need to find the roles that actually strengthen the business under pressure. Four roles consistently convert spend into resilience and growth: cybersecurity consultants, digital transformation consultants, AI engineers, and data engineers.
This reflects where demand is persistent and justified by risk and value.
The World Economic Forum’s latest Future of Jobs analysis places AI and big data among the fastest-growing skill domains, with networks and cybersecurity close behind, a pattern expected to intensify through 2030.
At the same time, the cybersecurity workforce gap has reached a new high, with an estimated 4,76-million additional professionals needed globally, underscoring why security capability remains a board-level concern.
Cybersecurity consultants reduce business risk
Boards now expect measurable reductions in cyber risk and clear accountability. The talent market cannot keep up, which is why experienced consultants remain essential to accelerate threat modelling, program design, incident readiness and regulatory alignment.
The gap between cyber roles needed and roles filled is still widening. This is a structural challenge, and it explains why external specialists are being retained to design controls, uplift teams, and transfer knowledge within a defined timeline.
Companies need to look at outcome-based job scopes that link to risk reduction. These include time to detect, time to contain, and time to close audit findings. If the engagement is measured only by hours, you will get activity instead of risk movement.
Digital transformation consultants provide disciplined execution
Transformation spend continues to grow as competitive advantage shifts toward data-rich, software-driven operating models.
IDC’s spending guide shows digital transformation outlays scaling to the multi-trillion level this decade. The value of a strong consulting partner is not in ideas but in landing workstreams that cross business, data, and technology with clean governance, change management and measurable outcomes.
For businesses looking to strengthen this component, they need talent capable of delivering program architecture that ties every use case to a benefit metric. This will enable faster decision-making and remove internal process obstacles. Change management or data readiness must also form part of this job role.
AI engineers turn ideas into products
AI has moved from exploring ideas to realising them. The WEF 2025 report lists AI and big data among the fastest-growing skill areas, with employers planning for rapid capability expansion.
Industry data shows companies are racing to operationalise AI, which is why specialised engineering roles are emerging and multiplying.
Companies, therefore, need engineers who can take a use case from model choice and data pipeline design through to deployment, monitoring, and privacy controls. The deliverable is a reliable, governed, and costed service. McKinsey estimates AI’s productivity upside in the trillions, but only where use cases are industrialised.
Data engineers are making data usable at scale
AI does not work without clean, timely, joined-up data. Data engineers design the pipelines, storage, orchestration, and governance that enable reliable analytics and AI. The WEF 2025 report identifies big data specialists among the fastest-growing roles globally.
Independent analyses point to strong demand growth, driven by real-time processing and ML workflows moving into production.
From a talent perspective, local companies need human resources to deliver platform choices that align with their cost and compliance realities, plus strong data contracts and lineage. Measure success by time-to-data for priority use cases.
The market will keep shifting, but the realities are that security remains non-negotiable, data is the foundation, and AI is moving from talk to build. Transformation is judged by execution. At EQPlus, we continue to see demand for these roles because they directly influence resilience rather than headcount.
Companies that fill these job specifications will translate technology spend into creating a more dynamic organisation capable of meeting the demands of the digital world. Those who do not will struggle to convert investment into business outcomes.