Article: Building Skills for a Digital Future - What's needed?

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Building Skills for a Digital Future - What's needed?

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Here's how companies need to think about skilling in a Digital First World
Building Skills for a Digital Future - What's needed?

Every major tech and non-tech company in India has announced a commitment to Digital. NASSCOM estimates that by 2025, Digital-led services would have grown four-fold as compared to a two-fold growth in traditional IT services. But is our workforce digitally enabled from a skills point of view?

A study by Deloitte estimates that the rapid pace of technology change in the workplace would lead to a skills shelf life of only 2.5 years, which means the current skill set may become redundant after some point of time. Digital is one of the headwinds that will not only bring about the obsolescence of skills that our workforce has today, but will also create demand for new/evolved skills. So what are some of the skills which will be required in the digital era? Are these unique? Can they be developed? 

Before answering that question, it is important to break the problem down into 3 steps

How we define Digital

Every company seems to define digital differently. But there are two underlying themes that emerge – Digital-enabled Experiences and Digitized IT Infrastructure. 

Digital-led experiences aim to create a seamless experience across all interface points a company has across it’s value chain. Digitization of IT infrastructure leverages cloud, automation, security, agile, devops etc in making monolithic IT more agile, and more adaptable to user needs

What Roles will Digital require

Once Digital is defined, it is important to look at the roles that drive the delivery of digital experiences or digitized infrastructure. For example, UI/UX consultants, UI/UX designers, mobile app developers, testers, social media marketers, digital artisits

What Skills will those roles require

Once the roles are defined, companies need to break down those roles into the skills they will possess. For example, UI/UX consultant would need to possess design thinking, UX design, UX development, psychology and data science – all of which  work together to deliver a holistic user experience transformation solution to a client

How do we go about building those skills

For an Enterprise to be Digital-ready, they need to focus on a digital-skill building mission along multiple dimensions

  • Digital Foundation – here the company’s focus is on training new entrants into its workforce on the fundamentals of Digital technologies
  • Digital Depth – the company identifies segments of employees  who have strong technical depth that can be cross-skilled onto Digital technologies
  • Digital Skilling at Scale – here the company’s focus is on providing fundamental digital competencies across the workforce

While Digital is becoming a buzz  word in the industry today, we must ensure that we stay focused on the means to making a Digital First world a reality - Digital skill-building.

This article is written in partnership with Pluralsight, a technology learning platform which provides the agility to accelerate market leadership through technology, grow and retain top talent and deliver on key business objectives. 

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Topics: Skilling, Learning & Development, #Create The Future

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