Workforce Digital Skills
Insights for leaders navigating a digital world.
Welcome to Leading Digital - a three minute read designed to help you ask better questions, make smarter tech decisions, and lead with confidence in today's digital environment.
Build it and they will adopt it... right?
Technological developments driving skills changes in the workforce is not new, however the major shake up posed by AI has shone a harsh spotlight on the state of digital skills at work. All of the think tanks and policy groups agree, we need a more digitally skilled workforce. But they also agree we're coming up short in the talent pool, and that the need extends far beyond 'tech roles'. So, what does the mean for us as leaders? We need to upskill the employees we already have.
How, you ask? I can categorise the approaches I've seen lately into 3 buckets:
Organisation-wide program. This might include adopting a skills framework, mapping employee tasks to required skills, assessing skills of individuals and an army of HR support.
Business area or leader initiated efforts. This usually looks like some group activities (think lunch & learn or guest speakers) along with self-paced resources, and the occasional external training course.
Employee-driven learning. Here, leaders assume employees will figure it out and ask if they need something.
The right approach will depend on your strategy and workplace culture. In some cases you'll want to take a layered approach for different skills and pick up multiple strategies. The critical piece is that organisations that have done the thinking and the trial and error on how upskilling works for them have better agility when it comes to adopting new technologies.
There's no one correct way to go about it, but it's definitely not going to be luck that builds a culture of contiuous learning. Without it, implementing new technologies will feel like an uphill battle.
Leaders have been asking...
Asking great questions is a leadership skill you already have. Here are some questions you can ask to help you understand where you are with digital skills.
A question to ask yourself: "How are we working with employees to meet changing skills needs? Are we doing enough?"
A question to ask your people leaders: "Which critical tasks now rely on AI or digital tools, and have we mapped the skills required?"
A question for your staff survey: "How supported do you feel to learn new digital skills and to use technology systems at work?"
Take action!
This fortnight you can get some insight into how the expectations on your workforce have changed with this quick activity.
Choose a job role that's core to your organisation - perhaps a customer service role - and find the most recent job listing you used to hire for it. If you had to hire someone new for that job today, what would you change? Would you like the ideal candidate to have strong AI prompting skills, or a high level of digital literacy?
Now ask yourself, how have we upskilled the person in the job today so they could be the ideal candidate? If the answer is "we haven't", you may like to refer back to some of the options above!
The best technology won't perform if you don't have a confident, skilled workforce operating it. Digital skills aren't a nice to have any more and as leaders we can't simply assume everyone will just pick them up. A clear understanding of what skills are needed and how you'll ensure staff have them is a great contributor to the digital capability of any organisation.
I'll be back in your inbox next fortnight with more on digital leadership.
Scarlett
