Senior executives need to prepare their organizations for digital transformation. This starts by closing the digital skills gap.
by Jim Sinur
(Aragon Research) – The destination to digital transformation isn’t fixed, and it will continue to change as technologies advance, as enterprises become more automated, and as the skills required to be productive change. This means that continuous learning will be essential to transformation.
As the relationship between humans and computers grows closer than ever before, it will be essential for your people to develop their digital skill sets and acquire new skills as they are needed. This is vital to not only understand the technologies they are working with, but to maximize their benefits.
As you lead your organization toward digital initiatives, make sure your people are not falling behind. Use this introduction as a guide to begin selecting and prioritizing the digital skills that are most essential for your organization’s unique digital business goals.
Digital Transformation Business Skills
Strategy and Planning
This skill set revolves around creating master plans and designing the measurements and operations needed to get to the desired outcomes. It requires establishing policies, action plans, and key performance indicators.
Digital Product Creation and Ownership
This skill set is related to oversight and development of new online products or services from inception to delivery. Using result data, manage improvements to enhance the digital product or service.
Digital Content Creation and Marketing
This form of marketing is focused on creating, publishing, and distributing digital content such as videos, podcasts, infographics, and blogs, for a target audience. This content is often used to attract and generate leads for future customers while increasing brand awareness or credibility.
Continuous Learning and Mentoring
Making sure that the company is enabling a continuous learning culture is key. This means encouraging managers to have learning and mentoring plans as part of how they run their operation.
Digital Transformation Business/Technical Skills
Digital Experience Design
Designing compelling and satisfactory interactions for people is essential for digital success. This skill set focuses on journeys and personas while optimizing the touchpoints for both people and the organization.
New Wave and Predictive Analytics
Applying the most useful analytics to big and fast data is essential to outflank competitors and intercept key trends. These “a-ha” moments allow for better decisions and actions that get to better outcomes. Understanding how to apply predictive analytics to a business problem using machine learning will be critical.
Agile Project Management/SCRUM
Project management involves planning, executing, controlling, and finishing the work of a team to achieve specific deliverables within time and quality specifications. Iterative and sandbox-like methods are part of this skill set.
Next-Generation Machine Learning
AI requires changes in managing projects, process, and applications. Teaching machine learning is one area of concentration for this skill set, but guiding and improving truly intelligent and agile systems that can self-change will be at the edge of digital.
Digital Transformation Technical Skills
Full Stack Architecture
Because of the rapidly changing and complex technology landscape, architecture is shifting to include fluency across all technology components that support digital efforts in development and operations.
Programming and DevOps
This skill set involves new digital development models, languages, and scripting languages to support rapid development and agile digital solutions. With the advent of cloud computing and agile infrastructure, the configuration and programming skills necessary to optimize operations will be in great demand.
Systems Administrators
The ability to manage the care and feeding of IT infrastructures, processes, and applications will be in short supply, making this skill set in high demand. This is especially true in highly distributed organizations with local resources.
Bottom Line
Excelling in the digital age requires a digital skill building plan, and it must account for continuous learning. In order to be the most productive, your people need to acquire and refine the digital skill sets that are vital for transformation.