COVID- 19 has led to a paradigm shift in the work culture. Organisations across the globe have adopted ‘Work from Home’ model and IT infrastructure is expected to support this influx of remote workers. This has accelerated the demand for digital transformation as traditional IT infrastructure cannot sustain and support the remote workforce.
Many organisations fail to understand digital transformation at the fundamental level. Digital transformation is not so much about the adoption of new technology as it is about the skilling of talent. For instance, buying a high-end automobile is of no use, if you do not know how to drive it. The same logic works here, adoption of new-age technologies can only be successful if the talent is skilled enough to use it.
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Even before the current crisis, the introduction of new technologies was transforming not only industries but also the nature of the jobs, creating a huge skill gap as a consequence. The coronavirus pandemic has aggravated this situation. A survey conducted by CareerBuilder last year showed that more than two-thirds (67 per cent) of employers surveyed are worried about growing skill gaps. As businesses are getting digitized at a faster rate, upskilling employees regularly is now more important than ever to avoid a gap between the skills and the needs of the organisation.
An organisation can take the following measures to upskill their workforce : Developing brief online training and skilling initiatives: More often than not, a daunting training program with modules of data, exercises and curriculum discourages employees to undertake skilling initiatives. The key here is to design really crisp and informative training modules that could focus on a particular technology. Further, a lengthy training program can be broken down into smaller modules that give participants a sense of achievement after the completion of every module.
Learning Management Systems (LMS): Often employees procrastinate skilling themselves because they do not feel the ease of access when it comes to attending online training and skilling initiatives. In such a scenario, having an internal LMS system can assist an organization in creating a single platform where trainees can seamlessly communicate with trainers in real-time and get their queries addressed. That’s not all, an LMS system allows trainees to access all the training related reports, dashboards, training and reference material on a single platform. Since these systems are cloud-based, trainees can log in from anywhere and anytime through simple login credentials and access all the data and even analyze their progress.
Partnering with an industry expert to conduct skilling: Sometimes an organisation might not be having internal expertise in a certain technology to conduct training and skilling initiatives in-house. In this case, they can partner with industry experts for designing specialized training and skilling sessions for their employees. Whether it’s participating in big conferences or joining small training sessions, each opportunity to listen to these experts can provide the right insight — especially around challenges that organizations face, best practices and even lessons learnt from past experiences.
Partnering with colleges and universities to design industry-relevant curriculum: The role that colleges and universities can play in bridging the skill gap cannot be undermined. The majority of today’s technology workforce begins their journey in higher education. Combining industry with academia has shown to have a positive impact on future talent, and has played a significant role in minimizing skills gaps. The industry should judiciously work with and look for new ways to help support universities and generate greater awareness around different industry-relevant topics
Adopting Microlearning: Microlearning refers to the delivery of learning content in the form of short online learning nuggets, each having a span of not more than 10 minutes. The learning content is divided into several bite-sized modules, each covering a specific learning objective. This kind of learning experience is ideal for employees as they have tight deadlines to meet and can seldom attend long online training sessions.
In these unprecedented times, organisations must consider skilling of talent before they embark on their digital transformation journey. Since, skilling initiatives are a great way to fulfill skill gaps, drive the performance of employees, and encourage retention, it should become a part of the IT budget to reap maximum ROI out of a digital transformation exercise.
