The Fourth Industrial Revolution has forced businesses to become future-ready. In the last decade, a growing number of organizations deployed new-age technologies to accelerate their business processes. However, most companies are still navigating this shift – where premium cognitive skills like leadership, innovation, and agility will play a central role. But how successfully are organizations implementing this change in their workforce? 

Let us take a closer look at the need for digital transformation training, and how to be future-ready by building a new digital talent development model. 

The Need for Digital Transformation Training 

Training for a digital transformation is an urgent priority for many businesses today. This is because the skills needed to support new business models and strategies, which are a part of the modern digital landscape are in short supply. Shorter product development cycles require employees to deploy a lean and agile product management process and maintain a continuous delivery pipeline. Furthermore, the focus on customer experience has forced businesses to create products and services that offer value to their customers like never before. 

Despite the obvious benefits of embracing digital transformation (increased revenue, profits, and market valuations), a majority of organizations are struggling to cope up. The Digital Talent Gap Card shows that despite 77% of organizations considering that missing ‘digital skills’ a key hurdle to digital transformation, only 46% are investing the skill development. Additionally, only 40% of the companies are working to align training efforts with overall digital strategies. As businesses prepare for a radically changed workforce, workplace, and the concept of work, there is an evident gap in the skills of current employees and what they are expected to do today and in the near future.

Building a Talent Development Model 

In order to use digital technologies to improve processes, engage talent, and drive innovation, a new talent development model is needed to ensure success and continuous learning. This model will borrow from both, internal and external, programs, courses, and content in order to expedite the learning journeys that employees undertake and make them more productive in a shorter time span. A few crucial components that will help make this model robust and comprehensive are agile methodologies, incremental capabilities, design thinking, an experimental mindset, a culture of collaboration, and focusing on new skills and technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence.  

In order to make the learning model relevant and engaging, leaders will first need to identify the root cause of any performance-related challenge they are facing. The same must be used as a foundation to build a business case, and a framework of training and learning must be designed around the same. Existent gaps in the current skills must be identified in order to devise an actionable plan for identifying the training topics and finalizing the indicators that will help to measure the outcomes of the program. Similarly, every employee’s learning plan must be mapped out with a special focus on cross-training and development, so that leaders have the support of multi-talented employees, who can provide their expertise wherever needed. 

Digital Transformation Learning: Being Future-Ready 

The focus of any ‘Digital Transformation Learning’ model needs to be on helping individual contributors, managers, and leaders achieve the following:

1. Understand where technology provides the most value to the organization and how to leverage it.
2. Identify the competency-building potential of technological innovations and consider the revenue-generating possibilities of pursuing them.
3. Encourage capability building in aspects of engineering, analytics, systems, design thinking, agile and user experience at a basic level.
4. Be ‘primed’ to spot opportunities for re-framing or extending their traditional business models to include a stronger digital dimension.
5. Take stock of the wide range of ways in which digital technologies can be leveraged internally to enhance communication and collaboration, increase innovation, and streamline operations.

Organizations at a high-level of digital maturity have made conscious effort to build a culture that accepts the risk of failure, is adaptive to market needs and disruption, actively implements innovation, values and encourages experimentation, recognizes and rewards collaboration, and focuses on adding value to the business. Strong digital leadership that relentlessly pursues a talent magnet strategy that is committed to skill, up-skill, train, and develop the workforce is necessary.  At the end of the day, digital transformation is not one step but a continuous journey, and the goal is to equip ourselves with the right skills and knowledge to build a better future.