The skills gap that’s simply too big to ignore

I read a statistic the other day that suggested that by 2030, over 21 million UK workers will be lacking basic digital skills. That’s almost too big a number to get your head around.

It’s easier perhaps to think about how 20% of digital and data vacancies remained unfilled in the public sector and Civil Service alone last year. Either way, the digital skills gap is very much alive and well.

For senior leaders looking to invest in their organisation’s digital skills, the prospect can be hugely daunting. So much talk of digital divides and skills shortages; so many suppliers; so much marketing hyperbole; and such large amounts of money being discussed.

However, not investing isn’t really an option. Your organisation will soon fall behind and become non-competitive. You’ll suffer from some brutally blunt staff comparisons, leading to issues around recruitment and retention. You’ll struggle to move away from legacy technology platforms or to capitalise on the latest innovations.

Three distinct groups

When thinking about the digital skills required in your organisation, I think it helps to think about your workforce in three distinct groups – and to acknowledge that each group requires its own learning and development strategy.

Those groups comprise (a) people who build or manage core digital products; (b) people who use digital tools to create other digital products; and (c) people who interact with digital products as part of delivering a service.

I think of the first group as our digital engineers; they’re the coders, the testers, the people who require the really hard technical skills. Their entire career development revolves around continually building their technical capability.

For them, training is all about keeping up with the latest standards and accreditations and being highly engaged with their industry peers. They’re likely to be engaged with structured external learning programmes that form part of their personal professional development plans.

Next up are the designers. They make heavy use of digital design tools and SAAS-based solutions. They’re users, not coders; so it’s less about the ones and zeros and making sure something works and more about using the technology to create something else.

Their training challenge lies in how many tools are out there nowadays. It often feels as if there’s a new tool being created every year that’s expected to be the new industry standard. Getting everyone within a team or organisation trained up to use the same tool(s) is increasingly tricky – but hugely important from a coordination and collaboration perspective. That’s why this group will likely benefit most from some form of in-house skills academy and taking advantage of blended learning models

And then finally, there’s the third group of non-technical end-users. They just need to be able to use a set of digital tools with confidence and be able to troubleshoot any basic issues they may have themselves. Digital, bite-sized learning is what that final group will most likely need; the sort of activities that can be dipped into within the flow of work.

Mind the gap

Careful investment in these areas can help narrow the digital divide which will exist in your organisation. Left unaddressed, such a divide can leave you with significant parts of your workforce that feel unable to adapt to rapid changes in digital technology.

You can’t really maintain a healthy working culture in an organisation with such a divide, because when a workforce isn’t aligned on its digital capabilities, it will be challenging to collaborate effectively.

I think the danger of this is too often overlooked. There’s an assumption that everyone can simply get up to speed with a new tool or technology – but that’s not the case. It takes more effort than that to get everyone pulling in the same direction.

Out with old, in with the new

Another area where digital skills investments may pay off handsomely is around the legacy technology that can hold organisations back. Typically, this isn’t be replaced when it should be because organisations don’t have the skills to understand or manage the necessary transformational change or to maintain the new infrastructure afterwards.

With such a limited understanding of their options, organisations naturally become risk averse and find themselves unable to take advantage of more advanced technologies. Securely implementing and maintaining applications on cloud infrastructure is one of the most obvious current examples of this.

As well as in cloud computing, I also see big capability gaps currently around AI and machine learning. These are three of the technologies with the greatest potential for transforming how we work and how we deliver services, yet workforces typically don’t have the skills or confidence to capitalise on them.

Unless organisations ramp up their efforts to understand – and prepare for – the impact of these technologies, they’ll be left behind. Worse still, they’ll expose themselves to risks along the way (data security issues, for example, or not thinking through the full implications of digital transformation projects) and could well end up with a really messy digital estate that proves almost impossible to untangle. Having the skills in place to manage all this is essential.

Practical steps

As a leader, I think it's important to remember that you don’t need to make everybody within your organisation a digital expert. The idea of developing ‘workforce-as-a-service’ comes into play here. The idea is that you have an in-house pool of talent with a host of digital skills that can be deployed as and when needed on projects around the organisation.

It’s a happy halfway house between parachuting in (possibly expensive) external resource with no knowledge of your business and wastefully developing specialist digital skills across too large a section of your workforce. This provides the flexibility and confidence an organisation needs to deploy people to manage their transformation projects, using the tools they already have at their disposal.

To any leader who remains unsure about where or how to target their digital skills investments, I’d simply advise them to understand their own business first.

Be clear on the foundation level of digital literacy you require across your organisation and the areas you want to improve. Understand the core digital skills that your people need to be able to adapt to the latest technology – and make sure they have them. Help them develop their digital confidence. Trying to resolve the digital skills investment debate can be a complex undertaking at the best of times – but this seems like a good place to start.

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