Why IT practitioners and business professionals learn new tech skills

Even if you have all of the right learning and development (L&D) resources, getting your people to use them is another story. 

It’s not that people don’t want to learn—they often do. But they don’t have a lot of time, and if they don’t see how learning will directly impact them, they aren’t going to prioritize it.

If you know why employees pursue new tech skills, though, you can create L&D programs aligned with their goals as well as business objectives.

Keep reading to uncover IT and business professionals’ top reasons for upskilling. Then, learn how to use those insights to boost employee engagement and show the value of learning and development to your people and business leaders.

According to our 2025 Tech Skills Report, IT professionals mainly learn new tech skills to:

• Earn a higher salary (53%)

• Achieve personal goals (43%)

• Improve their job security (42%)

• Advance their career (42%)

Business professionals, on the other hand, learn technical skills to:

• Improve their job security (47%)

• Advance their career (45%)

• Improve their confidence (45%)

• Secure more career options (44%)

While both technical and business professionals upskill to secure their jobs and grow their careers, there’s an important distinction. 

Tech professionals are learning because they genuinely want to. They’re curious and have personal goals for learning, likely because they recognize the importance of staying up to date in a fast-paced environment. 

Business professionals may share this curiosity to an extent, but they’re more focused on building confidence. They’re learning new skills so they can use certain tools or collaborate with other teams more effectively.

Understanding the different motivators for tech and non-technical employees will help you develop tailored upskilling programs for them. And when you make learning relevant, you’ll naturally improve engagement in the process.

Earning a higher salary is the top motivator for tech professionals. While you can’t promise that upskilling will result in raises or promotions, you can show employees how learning new skills will put them on the right track. 

After all, nearly half of IT practitioners (42%) and business professionals (43%) say completing company-sponsored upskilling programs helped them earn promotions or raises that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. 

For example, let's say you have a Junior Cloud Engineer who wants to become a Senior Cloud Engineer. To make that transition, they’ll need to deepen their technical expertise in Azure, AWS, or GCP. They’ll also need business skills to understand the bigger cloud architecture picture and design cloud solutions that meet organizational goals.

In other words, they’ll need to upskill. If you can frame your upskilling program as a career stepping stone, rather than as a business initiative they may or may not care about, you increase the chances of bringing them on board. 

They learn new skills to work towards a promotion. You show the value of learning and development. Your organization fills cloud skills gaps. It’s a win-win-win.

Explore our career roadmaps to help your employees plot their professional growth: 

• Cloud career paths

• Software development career paths

• Cybersecurity career paths

• AI career paths

With AI agents becoming digital colleagues and vibe coding disrupting traditional software development, it’s not surprising that IT practitioners and business professionals see upskilling as a way to retain their edge. 

Even if your employees haven’t said anything, they may be worried about their job. Explain how upskilling will help them adapt to new technologies and become more resilient. 

For example, mastering prompt engineering will empower them to use AI agents more efficiently. Bolstering their software development knowledge will allow them to spot errors in AI-assisted code. And improving their soft skills will enable them to take on creative, strategic work that machines simply can’t replace.

Learn how to overcome employee AI resistance.

When it comes to learning new tech skills, personal achievement is the second biggest motivator for IT practitioners. 

Ask your people what they’re interested in or passionate about. Maybe it’s earning all of the AWS certifications or picking up a new programming language. 

Whatever it is, those new skills can often benefit your organization, too. Encourage employees to learn something they’re interested in. Then, give them opportunities to apply their new skills on the job. These can also become projects they can showcase in their portfolio.

Lack of time has been the top barrier to learning for the past four years. If your employees don’t have time to learn, your upskilling efforts are wasted. 

Set aside dedicated learning hours each week and make sure managers respect that time. It may sound like a huge change up front, but in time, it will build a learning habit throughout your organization.

For example, the FinTech organization FIS gave employees two hours each week to learn new skills. Because of that, they were able to reduce the percentage of novice-level employees from 47% to 13%.

Get the Tech Upskilling Playbook for seven different strategies you can use to build a culture of continuous learning in your organization.

At the end of the day, improving employee engagement doesn’t mean you need to overhaul your learning and development strategy. You may just need to frame it differently.

When you show employees how upskilling benefits them directly, you give them a reason to care about your learning initiatives.

Engage your teams—learn more about Pluralsight’s hands-on tech skill development platform.