Ways to Close the Digital Skills Gap in the Workplace

According to the World Economic Forum, by 2022, there may be at least 133 million new roles as a result of technological advancement. But this also means that these roles may be difficult to fill since they are relatively new. For example, Facebook ads and Instagram ads are fairly new. Other examples include digital project management, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and many more.

Also, because of technology, some skills have changed drastically. For example, most of the work of human resource practitioners is now conducted through software. But since this technology is fairly new, some employees may find themselves unequipped for the position. But some can still transfer their old skills. This will affect their work performance.

The digital skills gap continues to widen as the years pass by. And this problem negatively affects businesses in many ways.

As such, businesses need to be more involved in closing the skills gaps for them to succeed and perform better than their competitors. Here are some things businesses can do:

Identify Gaps

Before doing anything, business owners need to conduct a skills gap analysis. This will help them locate the gaps in their respective organizations. Narrowing the needed skills will help them develop time-effective and cost-effective solutions.

For instance, a law firm that provides legal assistance regarding paying mortgages and acquiring properties needs to improve its social media strategies. They might conduct a social media marketing training for employees not knowing that some of them already have experience in the area. The lack of gap analysis cost the law firm precious time and money to develop the marketing training. Based on this example, conducting a skills gap analysis is essential.

Depending on the size of an organization, the data for this analysis can be collected via a survey form distributed to employees or through one-on-one conversations between employees and their team leaders. The organization can use the data collected to find areas of improvement.

Diversify Talent Pools

Businesses need to diversify their talent pools and look for candidates in places they didn't pay much attention to in the past. This means breaking down barriers and accepting people despite their religious beliefs, socioeconomic status, cultural background, gender identity, and other factors.

A business may currently be filtering out applicants who have college degrees unrelated to the positions they're applying for. This time, that business should consider disregarding educational background and focus more on the skills and experiences of the applicants. For instance, someone with a history degree but made a career out of software programming by taking coding courses online. While their educational background isn't relevant to their role, they have the digital skills needed.

Through the years, many studies have been conducted to understand the benefits of diversity in the workplace. Some benefits include better productivity, wider perspectives, and so on. Also, companies that have a diverse employee population are 35% more likely to gain financial returns over their competition. As such, diversifying the talent pool will lead to a diverse workplace. It will not only allow an organization to close the digital skills gap but also improve their organization in other aspects.

Invest in Internal Skills Development Programs

Sometimes, businesses don't need to search far and wide to find the right employees. Instead, they can invest in their current employees by providing upskilling and reskilling programs. For clarity, upskilling means learning new skills for a given position. Meanwhile, reskilling is developing new skills to transfer to a new role or position.

Investing in current employees is much more cost-effective than hiring new people. It will also take less time.

If employees are still working from home, businesses can conduct learning programs online. They can conduct webinars where experts will be invited to speak and share their knowledge with employees. Companies can also use e-modules. This mode of learning will allow employees to learn at their own pace.

Another alternative is to sponsor employees' access to already tried-and-tested online learning platforms such as Coursera, Skillshare, Udemy, and many others. This is a great option because a company no longer needs to start from scratch in developing learning programs for their employees.

Training programs will help employees feel valued. And they may express their gratitude through better work performance and retention, both of which also benefit the organization financially and productivity-wise.

The digital skills gap is a problem that businesses can't ignore. Instead, they need to actively resolve it. Otherwise, they're the ones who will suffer in the long run. Businesses can address the problem by identifying gaps, rethinking their recruitment strategies, and providing relevant learning programs to their employees.