Globally, how work gets done and where work gets done drastically changed in a few months. Every industry, every company, every user, every IT team was affected. Working from the office and collaborating face-to-face with peers quickly stopped and every employee and job function was moved to the home office. This sudden development led to the concept of Workforce Transformation.
The idea behind WFT was that in order to empower your workforce, you needed to provide employees with the right device and accessories and skilling to do their job and stay productive. This transformation was accelerated drastically due to the pandemic and the need to enable a remote workforce—but even though where and how work gets done changed, experience is still a top priority for the business.
Rapid and widespread digitalization has truly changed the nature of work, and digital skills are now regarded as essential for the modern workforce. While the demand for digital skills is high, supply is low. Digital skills have been underlined as key for the future of post-pandemic work. It has been highlighted that building digital skills across society has the potential to open up opportunities and allows businesses to unlock technologies to their full potential to deliver their vision.
As technology is integrated into workplaces with increased digitalization of supply chains and processes, employees need digital skills to work alongside new technologies and future-proof their careers. Employers are actively seeking employees with digital skills in order to adapt to an increasingly digitalized environment. In EU countries, there is a shortage of digitally skilled talent in the labour market where 57% of enterprises find it difficult to fill Information and Communications Technologies specialist roles.
This trend is also observed in other parts of the world. A study has shown that 69% of job postings in 2019 across New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, the United States, and Canada were in digital occupations.
A 2021 Salesforce report claims that 14 G20 countries, have lost out on $11.5 trillion in cumulative gross domestic product growth due to the digital skill gap being faced by the corporate sector. Simply put, in a digital world, there aren’t enough people with appropriate digital skills to power the technological transformation of companies. A 2023 Wiley Report, ‘Closing the Skills Gap’, shares in-depth insight into the talent shortage problem regarding how the demand for rapidly evolving digital skills is evolving too fast for companies to keep up.
Sixty-nine percent of the surveyed HR professionals believe their respective organizations suffer from a skill gap, which is a 14% rise from 2021. The talent shortage results in up to 20% of unfulfilled job postings. A 2022 Forbes article pointed out an interesting contradiction to explain why the skill gap exists. Despite Gen Z being the first truly ‘digital native’ generation, 55% of them admitted to having deficiencies in understanding the core tech trends of the time, namely, Artificial Intelligence (AI), cybersecurity, edge computing, or quantum computing. Intel’s general manager holds traditional academic disciplines responsible for this hard skill/soft skill disparity among the workforces.
Students from traditional STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) backgrounds lack soft skills in communication, creativity, and design thinking while studying only arts subjects fails to empower learners with the necessary tools to leverage technology to its maximum potential. A holistic technical education that accommodates the latest soft-skill requirements is the best way to navigate this climate of digital transformation.
