Solving the MSP Technician Shortage Without Overhiring

MSPs are not imagining the technician shortage, but it is narrower than the panic suggests. Hiring has gotten measurably harder over the past year, concentrated in specialized skills, while the broader labor pool for general support work is flat or shrinking. The fix is not simply hiring faster. It comes from matching each gap in your service desk to hiring, training, or automation, not defaulting to the first one.

How bad is the technician shortage, really?

The headline number comes from Kaseya's own customer base. In Kaseya's 2026 State of the MSP report, the share of MSPs who said it was difficult to find and hire skilled technicians jumped from 9 percent to 16 percent year over year, and 32 percent of respondents named staffing as one of their top three business issues for 2026. The same report found that 83 percent of MSPs now say their IT management tools significantly improve operational efficiency, according to Kaseya's 2026 State of the MSP report, which is why the report frames the shift directly: the operational bottleneck is moving from tools to people.

Zoom out and the picture gets more complicated. Government data covering the broader labor market, not just Kaseya's base, shows employment for computer user support specialists sat at 750,600 in 2025 and is projected to shrink over the next decade, with about 39,700 openings a year expected from people leaving the field, according to O*NET's labor market profile for the occupation, sourced from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is not a shortage of jobs. It is a shortage of qualified people willing to do the work at the wage currently on offer, where the median annual wage for a computer user support specialist was $61,860 in 2025, per the same O*NET profile.

Put those two data sets together and the shape of the problem gets clearer. The overall labor pool for generalist support work is not growing, but demand for the specific, higher-skill work your clients expect from an MSP keeps rising. That mismatch is what shows up in Kaseya's hiring-difficulty numbers.

The shortage is also not spread evenly across skill types. In the same Kaseya survey, 39 percent of MSPs reported difficulty hiring skilled cybersecurity professionals, up from 29 percent the year before, outpacing the shortage in general technical hiring, according to Kaseya's 2026 State of the MSP report. If your growth strategy leans on expanding security services, as most MSPs' growth strategies do, you are competing for the smallest and most contested part of the labor pool, not the general support pool the BLS numbers describe above.

Why hiring your way out isn't working

Demand for technical skill is not falling. CompTIA's broader labor data shows the U.S. tech workforce is projected to grow 1.9 percent in 2026, adding roughly 185,000 net jobs after a 0.3 percent contraction in 2025, according to CompTIA's State of the Tech Workforce 2026 report. Much of that growth concentrates around AI skills specifically, with more than 275,000 active U.S. job postings in January 2026 referencing a need for some level of AI skills, per the same CompTIA report. Every employer chasing that same pool of AI-capable technicians is bidding against MSPs running thinner margins than a few years ago. Tech pay generally outpaces the rest of the labor market too: CompTIA's State of the Tech Workforce 2026 report puts the 2024 median U.S. tech wage at $112,805, about 126 percent above the median wage across all U.S. occupations, which makes trying to outbid every other industry for the same shrinking pool of specialists an expensive way to close a staffing gap.

That's why CompTIA's companion research points away from headcount as the default lever. According to CompTIA's IT Industry Outlook 2026 report, training existing employees is the preferred approach technology employers plan to use to address skills gaps in 2026. The same survey found that 51 percent of respondents cited improved operational efficiency as a driver of their 2026 optimism, and 84 percent expect a significant or moderate increase in AI investment, per CompTIA's IT Industry Outlook 2026 report. That combination points a COO toward training and automation first, with outside hiring reserved for roles genuinely impossible to fill any other way.

Should you hire, train, or automate first?

Treat each layer of your service desk as a separate decision instead of attacking the shortage as one problem.

• Tier 1, repeatable tickets such as password resets, account provisioning, and routine alert triage: this is where AI-assisted automation absorbs volume fastest, and it is the layer where MSPs already report the heaviest automation use.
• Tier 2, specialized troubleshooting such as network issues, security incidents, and complex backup recovery: this is where hiring difficulty is sharpest, and where upskilling an existing generalist is often faster than recruiting a specialist from outside.
• Tier 3, strategic and client-facing work such as security planning and roadmap reviews: this is where you protect your best people's time by removing them from Tier 1 and Tier 2 work entirely.

None of this requires new headcount to start. It requires deciding, line by line, which tickets a technician should still be touching by hand.

Before committing to any one lever, spend a few weeks tagging tickets by tier as they come in. Most MSPs already have this data sitting in their PSA, they just haven't pulled it apart by skill level and resolution time. That tagging exercise is what turns "we need more technicians" from a gut feeling into an actual staffing plan broken out by tier, and it is usually the fastest way to find out you need fewer new hires than the initial headcount request suggested.

When training is the right lever, the fastest path is usually structured upskilling rather than ad hoc mentorship. Programs like Forge University exist for exactly this gap, turning a generalist technician into someone certifiable on the specialized work your clients are already asking for, without the months of lost productivity that come with recruiting and onboarding an outside hire.

Consider a hypothetical 20-person MSP fielding around 2,000 tickets a month. If half of those tickets are routine password resets, access requests, and alert triage, AI-assisted automation can absorb a meaningful share of that volume without touching headcount. That frees two or three technicians to move into the specialized and strategic tiers where the real hiring shortage is concentrated, which is a cheaper and faster fix than trying to recruit three new specialists in a market where finding them has nearly doubled in difficulty since last year.

If you are not sure how much of your current stack is already positioned to absorb Tier 1 volume versus how much still depends on manual technician time, running your tool set through the stack builder is a faster starting point than guessing.

What does this cost if you get it wrong?

Getting the hire-train-automate sequence wrong shows up on the P&L fast. Kaseya's report found that 40 percent of MSPs already have at least one full-time employee spending 80 percent or more of their time on backup and disaster recovery alone, according to Kaseya's 2026 State of the MSP report. That is capacity locked into one narrow function while the rest of the service desk runs short-staffed, and it is exactly the kind of imbalance that shows up as missed SLAs and burned-out senior technicians rather than as a clean hiring line item.

The same report's own recommendation for 2026 names the fix directly: use automation to reclaim technician time so an MSP can scale operations without increasing staffing at the same pace. That is a tool and process decision before it is a recruiting decision, and it is one a COO can start acting on this quarter rather than waiting on a hiring market that is not getting easier on its own.

Build the capacity you can't hire

The technician shortage is real, but it is a capacity problem first and a recruiting problem second. Start by mapping which tickets genuinely need a specialized human, train your existing team into the gaps you can close internally, and let automation absorb the repeatable volume underneath both. Compare where your stack stands against the broader set of white-labeled tools built for exactly this kind of productization in the Actiforge product catalog before committing budget to a new specialist hire you may not need yet.

Staffing math changes fast once automation and training are doing real work alongside your technicians, not just absorbing overflow on the worst days. See the full stack.