Wake Up To The Digital Skills Gap

<p><em>How it is secretly costing your organisation and its employees, writes <strong>Vinay Pradhan</strong></em><br><br>The frantic pace of technological change continues to have a major impact on businesses of all sizes and from every sector. Most companies, however, have yet to realize that their workers, now more than ever, need to adapt their digital skills to these rapid changes. A number of concepts that were merely talked about yesterday - Generation Y, Web 2.0, SaaS (Software as a Service), BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), the Cloud - are the realities we must all face today. Employees are at the very centre of these changes, finding newer and faster ways to work, whenever and wherever needed. Until only recently, employees used just 20 basic functions in the most representative software programs on the market, which was enough to demonstrate the ability to perform over a hundred different tasks. Today, they have more than 50 basic functions to learn across 50 software programs, apps, web services, and other devices, which amount to 2,500 basic skills to master.<br><br>The percentage of skilled youth in the workforce is less than 5% in India, a need for change that has been stressed upon by the government and the industry alike; especially with PM Narendra Modi specially focussing on the Skill India initiative. The shortage of digital skills in the current marketplace is unprecedented. A Capgemini report on 'The Digital Talent Gap' estimated that over 4.4 million IT jobs would have been created around Big Data by 2015; while only a third of these were expected to be filled. Nearly one in five millennials in the modern workplace perceivably lack crucial analytical skills.&nbsp; According to a CRISIL report, India is set to become the largest contributor to the global workforce with India's working population likely to increase to 962 million by 2030.<br><br>A June 2012 study by IDC shows that inadequate digital skills lead to a significant amount of loss of time and productivity. This equates to 21.3 percent of loss in the organization's total productivity, also calculable to $19,732 loss per worker per year. Organizations face these concerns with millennials as well. Capgemini's survey comprising of over 800 middle to upper management executives from over 50 industries shows that nearly one in five millennials in the modern workspace are perceived to be lacking analytical skills. A similar story can be heard in the United States, where McKinsey, the consulting firm, estimates this loss to be valued at $1.3 trillion. An organization with 1,000 people would therefore spend as much money addressing the skills gap issue as they would hiring 213 new employees. The reasons driving this skills shortage are not hard to identify. The usage of mobile, social and analytical tools is permeating the length and breadth of every function across the organization. Human resources and training managers are grappling with the problem of not being able to adequately measure either the amount of time wasted or the costs associated with their employees' lack of digital skills. &nbsp;<br><br>The idea of using technology to deliver training has been considered in the past and has been not embraced enthusiastically on account of several reasons. These include the discomfort of trainers and the trainees to train without the physical presence of each other, high initial investment, and limitations of technology led training in delivering training in technical subjects or where physical acumen is required, ability to personalise training and assessment methods to determine the competencies of the learners. Businesses must work harder to scale-up on their digital skills or risk losing competitiveness in the global marketplace. As the BYOD trend is becoming more widespread, CIOs are forced to allow company employees to use their own personal devices. Perhaps one of the main reasons for the renewed digital skills gap - which businesses thought to have bridged in the past decade - is the consumerization of IT and the misalignment between the technologies available for personal use and companies' ability to update their computer equipment.<br><br>Companies today have to surrender to the cloud and its paradigms (telecommuting, multiple devices, etc.). This new reality is dawning on businesses and governments alike, as major players across industries are pledging to create a more digitally educated workforce. Organizations need to tap into newer platforms for acquiring skills while also accelerating the pace of skills development. They need to understand that traditional skills and approaches are not going to help them in the digital age. Under these circumstances, how can companies be sure that their employees have an excellent command of the programs, web services, or other apps they use on a daily basis? How do they give them the tools they need to stay productive while using their office applications?<br><br>A simple answer could be to have an enterprise learning solution that lets your employees enhance their digital skills at their own time and pace, your L&amp;D managers monitor the performances to ensure alignment with business objectives, and enables your IT team to easily integrate it into their infrastructure. Organizations across the globe have started doing this for their employees to meet their desktop and new technology training needs. Small businesses seeking to train their employees, or large corporations in need of wide-scale training solutions are moving towards integrated platforms like Vodeclic. Ease of use, quick integration and deployment and highly effective teaching method should be the core of such platforms.<br><br>To stay competitive, the solution is for companies to wake up to the digital skills gap amidst their employees and proactively implement regular training to ensure their workers acquire the required skills. The content and devices need to be responsive and adaptable. This is significant in the Indian context as over the next few years, with the momentum for digital India picking up and internet access becoming feasible throughout the country, most employees will have devices of various kinds and forms that can be connected to and access online training on demand and with ease. Digital skills requirements vary from one organization to the other based on their digital maturity and transformational capability. Key focus areas will depend on individual business requirements as well as availability of resources. Organizations need to define a vision, identify future skill requirements, undertake a comprehensive skills gap assessment, take steps to bridge the gap and finally initiate actions to constantly evaluate progress in their journey to develop digital skills.<br><br><strong>1.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Give everyone access to training</strong><br>As cloud-based software and applications evolve at a breakneck pace, the common challenge among all will be to keep our skills up-to-date, or else be left behind. For this to be possible, companies should adopt a user-centric solution that is both mobile and flexible, giving users the ability to improve their digital skills when and where they need it, via an intranet or dedicated portal, on their tablet, mobile phone, or personal PC, in the office or at home. The outdated, ad hoc training model, lasting 1 hour, 3 hours, 1 day or 2 days, is no longer relevant! In order to survive, firms must break away from the constraints of traditional training and consider how people learn within their daily work flow.<br><br><strong>2.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Promote employee self-reliance</strong><br>Training should allow workers to have the freedom to educate themselves whenever and wherever they want. Not only should training be accessible, organizations must encourage employees to be self-reliant and pave their own career path through skill-building courses. The solution should also be very intuitive and user-friendly in order to ensure that employees don't need to be trained excessively on how to use the solution itself.<br><br><strong>3.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Reduce IT Helpdesk's work load</strong><br>HR and business unit managers aren't the only ones affected by their employees' lack of digital skills. The help desk is too. It is therefore in the best interest of both departments to care about these issues and work together on a solution. Organizations can help reduce costs with the help of training solutions that reduce the number of calls to help desk, thus enabling help desk to take over the role of a tutor. Ultimately, the effectiveness and success of a solution depends largely on the involvement of the interested parties, from selecting and testing to deploying the solution.<br><br><strong>4.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Measure ROI and control costs</strong><br>The adopted solution must give CEOs the ability to measure the ROI of training activities, ensure business alignment and take whatever steps are necessary to get more value from the money invested.<br><br><strong>5.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Keep up with the software updates</strong><br>With the advent of the cloud, leading software publishers have dramatically increased the frequency of their updates. A flood of announcements are released every day. The answer is to proactively implement a future-proof training solution that is flexible, agile, and mobile.<br><br><strong>6.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Design the training solutions around the technologies used</strong><br>Firms must adopt and implement a one-size-fits-all training solution that works on any device and is developed with a "responsive design" approach to enable viewing on any screen size or resolution. But one needs to remember that it cannot be "one-size-fits-all" for all organizations. Recently, Procter &amp; Gamble established a baseline for all its employees through a "digital skills inventory," and set proficiency expectations for specific roles and career progression. Pepsi launched its "digital fitness" program to keep its marketers' digital skills up to par.<br><br>New technologies have the potential to transform productivity in the workplace. But, this potential will remain unrealized unless we empower the workforce with the digital skills necessary to take advantage. Scale, speed, quality and mass customisation can be achieved by imaginative use of technology in training delivery. Building digital skills is only a part of the overall digital transformation agenda. Organizations will have to continue working towards sustaining the advantage that they gain through these digital skills. This will require sustained efforts towards training and re-skilling. Acquiring digital skills is the first, albeit significant, step of a long journey to a successful digital transformation. Act quickly and your organization will reap the benefits.<br><br><em>The author is country manager - India, Skillsoft</em></p>