Get employees technologically up to speed through hiring, upskilling, and reskilling.
Your organization's engineers and developers are certainly familiar with the latest technologies. But is the rest of your organization? Do your employees know how these tools relate to your organization's success? In today's digital economy, everyone must all be well versed in the technologies that are permeating every aspect of our work and personal lives.
If digital collaboration isn't something you're required to do on a day-to-day basis, chances are it's heading your way soon. Artificial intelligence is already firmly integrated into our work lives. AI is in use whether you're a digital marketer, an avid Slack user, in charge of stocking your office supply cabinet, or starting your videoconference call. Once solely reserved for statisticians, data analytics skills are rapidly becoming the foundation of several nontechnical roles. At a minimum, today's workers must know the fundamentals of data science and be an informed consumer of data—knowing what data to ask for, how to ask for it, and how to interpret it.
The message is clear. Today's workplace requires employees to be “digital ready”: They need both technical and cognitive skills to employ modern productivity and collaboration tools effectively.
Is there a digital skills gap?
Digital technology is having a profound and mounting effect on businesses. CEOs understand that digital transformation is necessary for ongoing survival. However, organizations must continuously upskill and reskill employees to remain competitive. According to leading researchers, 70 percent of CEOs believe upskilling of current employees is required to be competitive in today's digital world.
With these broad changes, most, if not all, jobs and the skills that they require are changing. Technical skills are particularly in-demand—according to a 2017 Brookings report, 48 percent of jobs that once required a low degree of digital skills now require proficiency in productivity and collaboration tools. Furthermore, demand for tech-savvy workers has extended far beyond the bounds of enterprise technology and software development. HR, business administration, and marketing professionals now must possess a wide range of digital skills. And those in nontechnical roles must have the digital skills to handle high-demand topics such as analytics, project management, collaboration, and data-driven decision making.
Employers must lead the effort to reskill employees to
ensure that new technologies are truly enabling work. With proficiency in some of these high-demand areas as low as 39 percent, according to a 2017 CapGemini report, organizations have work to do.
Digital skills' effect on hiring, employee growth
Hiring talent with the right digital skill set is a significant, growing concern for organizations. While some perceive hiring Millennials as a quick fix to alleviate any digital skills gaps, this unfortunately does not translate into immediate productivity in the workplace. Despite spending roughly 35 hours a week on digital media, Millennials don't always have the required technological and digital skill set for a business setting. In fact, according to one estimate in a Change the Equation report, 58 percent of Millennials have low skills when using technology to solve problems.
A new constant in today's world is that roles will—and must—change as business needs do. In response, businesses must hire candidates who have the skill set that will meet current needs and that will adapt and grow as the organization's needs evolve. Digital adaptability and continuous learning are particularly critical to support employees moving into newly defined roles. This will lead to the rise of the T-shaped employee. For instance, entry-level employees must possess a digital growth mindset to enable their professional movement both horizontally and vertically within an organization.
Determining your organization's digital skills gap
Continual learning and training are key to overcoming the digital skills gap. Having a digitally proficient workforce is more than ensuring your staff can use existing productivity and collaboration tools. It is also about having a digital growth mindset. Employees need to be able to quickly adopt new technologies and leverage updates as available.
Additionally, digitally literate workers should have a critical eye toward information they encounter and create so they can analyze and evaluate that information appropriately while solving problems and building shared knowledge across the organization. Finally, they must be good digital citizens. Through new collaboration tools, they must be able to interact internally and externally in a responsible, ethical way that aligns to the company's ethos.
The best way to evaluate your employees' digital skills proficiency is to develop and implement a digital-ready assessment. This can be broad or narrow, so it's essential to determine whether you need a comprehensive digital skill set analysis or a targeted assessment.
Creating a digital skills catalog is the next step. It's important to understand which digital technologies employees use at your company and which technologies you intend to adopt in the future. Within those technologies, identify the technical competencies and skills your organization needs for effective use. For example, if employees must create new information, can they do so with the data or word processing tools at your organization? Or if employees need to work across platforms, what are those platforms and what level of fluency or expertise is required of employees?
For collaborative or social tools, do all employees understand how to communicate effectively, respectfully, and responsibly, much less understand how to use technology-specific features to do so? Finally, do employees have the cognitive skill set necessary to evaluate the wide variety of digital content they encounter daily for accuracy and currency?
This catalog of digital needs can guide you as you develop assessment questions. When writing each question, readily use internal resources (such as your IT department) or external sources (such as organizations focused on digital citizenship) to ensure accuracy. Employ question types beyond the standard multiple-choice and rankings and instead use scenario-based questions to make sure your questionnaire assesses competencies surrounding judgment, norms, ethics, and so forth. Practice-based exams, while a bit more time consuming to create, can help employees demonstrate the knowledge and skills they already possess. As with all assessments or surveys, be sure to test and adjust questions for clarity with a sample cohort before you broadly disseminate them. This will ensure you achieve the best results.
The assessment results will help you identify where skills gaps exist across certain roles and demographics and within technologies and topical areas. Use those data to drive skill remediation and adjust current practices that may inadvertently result in a skills gap. Three areas that provide prime opportunities to close the digital skills gap are employee upskilling, onboarding, and technology rollouts and updates.
Upskilling and reskilling digital skills
According to the 2017 CapGemini report, companies that invest in training to fill talent gaps gain benefits:
- Eighty-five percent see productivity improvements.
- Eighty-six percent see reduced time to learn new skills.
- Seventy-five percent have a nimbler workforce.
While it can be challenging to find the time and budget to reskill existing employees, the benefits far outweigh the immediate pain. You can fill these gaps in several ways, and depending on the type of gap you see, one or more methods may be appropriate.
An easier type of training is just-in-time, video-based learning. Concise videos provide microlearning in easy-to-consume bursts. These microlearning videos are often engaging and can be easily segmented so companies can take advantage of small periods of time that employees have available. Taken one or two at a time, microlearning videos provide direct answers to immediate questions or quickly onboard employees to a new application or technology.
AdvertisementSome topics may require a deeper dive into specific subject matter. For this, you can use different mechanisms to deliver macrolearning. For example, use a collection of microlearning videos to form a course; a series of courses can form a learning path. Employees may then access these learning paths anywhere and fit them into their schedule in segments. Online
or in-person boot camps are a more concentrated method of acquiring a deep understanding of new skills.
Organizations may also want to look for on-demand or online mentoring resources, particularly for topics that can quickly
become quite technical. Books can augment these methods, and all can improve your workforce's digital skills profile.
Accelerate new technology usage
Rolling out a new technology organization-wide is an extensive, time-consuming process. A lot of time and effort go into all aspects of the process, including selecting the technology, preparing internal systems and processes, and migrating necessary internal information. At the tail end of adoption is the rollout to employees and their subsequent usage. Developing and implementing an appropriate user-facing migration and training program during the rollout can significantly increase employee usage.
Conveniently, many of the same training resources you use for upskilling and reskilling (such as microlearning and learning paths) are appropriate for this situation. Quick reference guides and job aids can be added resources to address employees' training needs in the moment. Packaging this training program in a way that users may access it when they need it and in the modality that works for them is key to enabling learning in the flow of work.
Level-set digital skills during onboarding
The first week or two of a new employee's time at an organization is an opportunity to pass on critical knowledge about the company's history, culture, and benefits as well as an ideal time to ensure that employees are digitally ready to start their new jobs. Work with functional areas to understand the main technologies in use that were not hiring requirements. It's probable that a new hire may be familiar with one brand of videoconferencing, for example, but not the one your organization uses. Take time during the onboarding process to provide training on the productivity and collaboration tools that will become daily necessities for the new employee. Doing so will enable the individual to become more immediately productive in his team and help establish a culture of learning in your organization.
As the skills gap widens, organizations need to take a variety of measures to understand and then counteract the skills gap and ensure that they are optimally positioned for success. To foster innovation and productivity across all aspects of your business, every employee must possess a wide range of digital skills as well as the digital mindset to continually evolve them.
Read more from CTDO magazine: Essential talent development content for C-suite leaders.
