Yesterday’s skills are not enough to cope with today’s digital transformation
Digital Transformation
Digital technologies impact every facet of any organizational behaviour, both internally and externally and we are here to discuss digital transformation. Digital technologies afford the opportunities to boost efficiency and performance within organizations and improve the industrial revolution that a decade ago were even unthinkable!
Geographically dispersed teams can now collaborate in real-time, and organizations can analyze big data to identify issues. Despite these opportunities, organizations have to unleash the full potential which digital technologies offer.
On the other hand, the digital disruption in the present era has reached the societal level, causing fear, anxiety, insecurity and uncertainty regarding the future. Contrary to a decade ago, a graduate degree is no longer enough to develop the skills required to build a life-long career. To master this perpetual change, organizations and people at individual levels must consider “learning and development” as a never-ending cycle of persistent improvement. Failing to do so will lead to obsolescence.
Individuals careless toward learning will endanger their careers. In the same way, the companies unwilling to open doors toward innovative learning will not survive in this digital transformation era. Learning nowadays is less about reserving the hour of training as a big ratio of people cannot cut themselves off to concentrate for prolonged periods. Traditional didactic methods are now incompatible with the new working habits.
Learning nowadays is happening on planes, on subway platforms, even in vehicles, as a result of which the contemporary learners expect learning to be quick and immediately useful. Organizations need to focus on empowering the staff to develop and enrich themselves by providing them with the framework, tools, and autonomy.
The Digital Literacy:
Many companies are choosing to train their staff to join the present race toward digital transformation. Developing these technical skills is laudable, but teaching staff members merely about how to create a bar chart or how to use certain software is just not enough. Acquiring a solid range of proper digital skills is of utmost importance. Simply training the employees or students for operating different types of softwares addresses only part of the problem. The absolute skillset is needed to survive the digital transformation, following a more holistic approach (to create a sustainable value).
Academic research defines “digital literacy” as an interdisciplinary skill subset (that must be working in harmony). This interdisciplinary skillset includes:
(1) Information, media and technology skills.
(2) Learning and innovation skills.
(3) Life and career skills.
This categorization insists that “digital literacy” is a multi-faceted sphere and not simply the mastery of technological skills. In short, digital literacy involves far more than the mere ability to operate digital devices, i.e., it includes a variety of complex cognitive, sociological, motor and emotional skills, which the users need for effective functioning in the digital environments.
Designing the strategy:
The five ‘C’s are the characteristics that are to be focused on in this process:
- Complementary
The development program should focus the complementary skills (in the sense that functional skills, technical skills and behavioural skills work together). Learning strategies must focus on how the subjects are interconnected, as these skills are interdependent, they should be acquired and learned simultaneously.
- Concurrency
In the process of improving student engagement, like learning to drive, digital skillsets etc., all this should be addressed concurrently, “all infused into core content as both process and outcome.”
- Contextualization
Skillsets underpinning digital literacy change according to the specific context in which they are utilized. For example, in a video conference, the interactions in a small group of five people familiar with each other would be different from those involving ten strangers. Though the relevant technical skills may be similar in both settings, i.e., mastery of the software to hold the video conference, the behavioural and functional skills would certainly be different. The way a video conference is managed and organized depends on specific parameters ( type of interaction, physical interaction, number of people, etc.) and, therefore, the targeted skillset has to be contextualized.
Digital literacy is the mastery and delicate interplay of all related skill groups in a variety of contexts. For example, while driving a car, it is not about merely mastering functional, technical and behavioural skills ( in one context) to be the evidence of “skilled driver”; instead, it is by mastering the overall ensemble skills in various environments that make a better driver.
- Collaboration
The changing nature of a learner’s expectations has to be taken under consideration while designing any development strategy to optimize the engagement based on collaboration. It can be taken as “a shift between technology usage (for supporting the individual) to technology usage for supporting relationships between individuals. With this kind of shift, we discover new social protocols and new tools that facilitate us in helping each other, which is crucial for social learning.
Attention has to be given to how and what is taught; if learners are engaged, diverting from didactic toward constructivist pedagogy is essential. A teacher-student relationship has to be shifted from expert-disciple toward peer-based collaborative learning.
- Continuity
Digital tools evolve and incorporate innovative features regularly ( for example, think about the various versions of Microsoft Office in the past decade). For bridging the digital gap sustainably, learning doesn’t have to be considered as just a ‘one-time affair”. Training targeting digital literacy has to be kept ongoing and evolving.
The new paradigm for development in the present century is different from the past models because organizations must address people “how to learn”. It will be possible by designing a sound strategy that has to be integrated with changing needs in both delivery and content for a true digital transformation.
