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We all know there is a growing and substantial shortage of Digital Skills in industries and across continents. It’s not a question of whether there is a demand for digital skills but rather how to deliver high-quality training for professionals and businesses.
The speed and scale of change are the biggest challenges for organizations as they continue to integrate digital into their business. This pace means that many professionals in their current roles and recent graduates seeking career opportunities need to be qualified to drive digital needs for businesses.
The challenge is that digital maturity is a difficult task for companies. Still, individuals with the ‘right skills’ face fierce competition to gain expertise and see salary increases, a third higher than the national average.
Why aren’t professionals adequately prepared for most of the existing roles today, and what can educators do to change this? This article will look at four things you should know to take advantage of the growing digital skills gap.
Demand exceeds supply
Digital skills shortage is a growing concern for employees, business leaders, and thought leaders as we enter a digital industrial revolution.
The talent competition is expected to get even more intense in 2017 as more than half the talent acquisition leaders expect their hiring volumes to increase. According to Burning Glass, the demand for digital skills is only increasing. Advertisements for digital jobs in non-digital sectors grew 34% between 2012 and 2015.
Digital is now pervasive, and its impact extends beyond one department. It permeates the entire business. While marketers must stay abreast of the latest digital technologies to deliver exceptional customer service, IT departments need digital expertise to know how to feed the data collected by the department through the business to drive success. HR professionals need to be able to use social media and digital channels to reach a digitally-savvy workforce. Journalists, who were once bound to traditional reporting, must now learn how to utilize digital platforms to take advantage of real-time reporting.
Virgin, a company that is no stranger to innovation but also a market disruptor, believes the digital revolution offers a PS92 billion opportunity for firms who invest and fully develop their digital potential. Virgin believes that if digital investments are made, and digital capabilities are improved, UK companies can create over one million new jobs in the next two years. This is food for thought for a market that already needs more digital expertise.
Two reasons why people are afraid of robots
Automation is a cost-saving and efficiency-enhancing tool as AI and deep learning gain traction. According to McKinsey’s currently demonstrated technologies, 45% of activities people are paid to do could be automated, while 60% of occupations would see at least 30% of their activities automated.
Many professionals feel the pressure, especially in specific sectors like logistics, retailing, accounting, finance, and manufacturing, who are at high risk from computerization.
This is not the first instance that the question of computers replacing people has been raised. In the 1960s, when robots and computers began to be used in factories, President John F. Kennedy said it was essential to maintain full employment when automation replaced men.
In the past, technology has created more jobs than it destroyed. David Autor, an MIT economist, believes that “automating a task so that it can be done more quickly or cheaper increases the need for human workers who do other tasks that haven’t been automated.”
Consider the banking industry. Many people thought introducing ATMs would mean a downturn in the banking industry. The number of bank tellers decreased, but the cost to run a branch was also lower, which allowed more branches to open to meet the customer demand. The demand for workers increased, and their work style changed as they moved away from routine tasks to things like customer service and sales that machines could not do.
The increasing speed of communication and access to information has revolutionized many knowledge-based sectors, creating new roles and a workforce ready for retraining and upskilling.
New hiring processes
Digital technologies are changing the way people recruit talent. A new approach to talent acquisition has emerged as millennials and Generation Z enter the workforce. While a resume used to be the calling card of employers, now it is about the skills individuals possess and how they could benefit a company. The shift from resume-based hiring to skills-based recruitment benefits employers, who can identify the gaps in their businesses and what they need to fill them with. It also matches an individual’s talents and potential to a company where they will thrive and grow.
Deborah Henretta Group President Asia & Global Specialty Channel, Procter & Gamble
Take cyberCoders, a permanent placement company that focuses on technology. Knowing there was fierce competition, they wanted to attract top talent early on in their career. CyberCoders’ Associate Recruiter Program teaches highly motivated, educated, and competitive people how to use technology in various markets. They are providing young professionals the tools to develop their business development skills and recruiters to help them have a long and successful careers.
The training needs to be focused on the skills of today and tomorrow
Most university marketing programs offer training in analytics, quantitative analysis, and research techniques. Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D., says that while these skills are helpful, they are only sometimes recontextualized to the fast-moving digital marketing world. Courses need to be practical to prepare students for the world of modern work and everything it offers.
The most pressing problem is that digital students need to be taught these topics in depth or at all. They are the foundation of any successful digital program. According to 31% of students, their universities do not offer or are unaware of any courses that encourage the development of digital or technical skills.
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