In this report, the researchers found that employees and management alike need to be continuously learning and updating their skills “to work effectively in a digital world.” In fact, more than 90 per cent of employee respondents said so, and 44 per cent said that they need to be continuously updating their skills to “do their job effectively.”
According to the report, for a company to successfully achieve digital transformation, employees must always be learning and be encouraged and supported by the company to always be learning.
Diving deeper, employees reported to researchers that, for the majority, this impulse to educate is not the case. Employees know, or have the inkling that, they need to always be working on developing their skills, but they also say they get “little to no support” from their employer in doing this. Of the 90 percent of respondents who said they need to update their skills “at least yearly,” only 34 per cent claimed satisfaction with how their organization supports this ongoing development.
A part of the problem, states the report, is that too often companies rely on “formal training” for skill development, when they should be working towards creating an environment that allows for and supports “on-the-job learning.” Employees also said, overwhelmingly, that they would be willing to conduct this training themselves, given they had the proper tools, like data analytics.
These results vary depending on who you talk to and what stage their company is at.
According to the findings, digitally maturing companies do more with regards to helping their employees re-skill and retrain. 59 per cent of respondents from these digitally maturing companies said they were “satisfied with how their company is helping them prepare for changes necessary for working in a digital environment.” On the other hand, 13 per cent of employees at early-stage companies and 29 per cent at developing-stage companies responded that way, demonstrating a significant gap in how companies support their employees development of digital skills.
As Devarshi Vajpayee, a digital consultant from Wipro Digital, writes in a blog post on how digital transformation can be driven by employees, “There are many who overlook the impact employees can make in digital transformation. It is critical for any organization undergoing digital transformation to enrich the experiences of its employees and their opportunities for global collaboration and communication.”
Businesses must carefully consider their needs and those of their #employees when implementing #digital transformation. Via @ITProPortal #technology pic.twitter.com/rvIL5GUOhb
— Canadian Institute of Management (@CIM_National) June 4, 2018
Achieving digital transformation also depends heavily on how well the leadership of a company is trained, a leader who doesn’t know how to work effectively in a digital world will not be able to help their employees access effective training, or provide the digital tools necessary for that training.
