Businesses are correctly fixated on navigating a potential recovery right now, but they’ll shortly have bigger fish to fry. As the job market heats up – and this is particularly true for technology pros as IT staffing budgets continue to move toward pre-recession norms – the challenge of retaining top talent that companies are almost universally experiencing provides a preview of what is coming over the next few years. A competitive job market combined with mass retirement of baby-boomers means that when it comes to picking the best leadership for our companies, the pool is going to be small – really small.

For the generation poised to fill leadership spots vacated by boomers, this is going to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they’ll have plenty of opportunities to advance. On the other hand, they’re going to deal with a very high level of responsibility and all the stresses that come along with it without the benefit of the years of experience that your predecessors had.

However, sometimes things work out in unexpected ways. For example, the coming of this dreaded “leadership gap” is timed to coincide with another major development – domination of cloud computing in business - including break-through sales cloud and service cloud technologies. While most media coverage of this development fixates on cost savings, the cloud actually opens up a host of opportunities for an innovative and talented leader to compensate for lack of experience.

First, consider how cloud applications are enabling factors such as real-time data and analytics. There’s been much talk in the news lately about the high-hopes companies are placing on “big data” – the incomprehensibly huge amount of data that corporations have amassed over the past several decades and are just beginning to mine. Cloud-based analytics and reporting will enable the next generation of leaders to extrapolate, analyze and share a treasure-trove of information in real-time across global organizations. Contrast this scenario to the old school, where by the time the CEO gets the report, it’s half-way to ancient history.