With much of the workforce cooped up at home for eight months or so, many of us have had to get increasingly tech-savvy in a hurry.Patricia Miller is already a pro. Miller works for management consultants PwC in Tampa, Florida. She signed up for the firm's Digital Accelerators programme that aims to boost the high-tech skills of its workforce.
"I didn't even code prior to this program, and now every time I get to use my coding skills like Python, I do a little happy dance," Miller said.Digital upskilling is not new: Amazon announced a US$700 million initiative to boost the digital skills of its workforce last year. PwC rolled out its own US$3 billion program, and a flurry of other corporate giants from Nationwide to Home Depot to IBM are all doing the same.
"Since the pandemic started, companies are fast-tracking their embrace of digital technologies," said Gianni Giacomelli, chief innovation officer at business transformation firm Genpact, and head of innovation design at MIT's Collective Intelligence Design Lab."They are enabling people to learn wherever they are, whenever they want, on any device."It stands to reason that equipping employees for the digital world would have positive bottom-line results.
The real challenge in digital upskilling lies in execution, especially if you are talking about large companies with thousands of employees. Making an entire workforce digitally savvy, especially when the latest technologies are changing all the time, is a bit like herding cats.A lot of employee learning just does not get done because the task can seem so massive and daunting.