With technological advances, demand for digitally skilled people is skyrocketing

The landscape of technology and digital platforms nowadays is radically changing. To harness their power and garner high ROI, many companies are shifting from traditional business models to smarter and agile ones. However, they significantly face a surging demand for digitally skilled talents that can serve their market or niche. As today's workplace is an always-connected environment, it has become essential for businesses to have a digital workforce. A digital workforce gives an organization the power to meet unexpected and unprecedented demands.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has shown the significance of being digitally connected. Companies that leveraged advanced technologies like AI, ML and cloud with digitally skilled people have demonstrated the ability to thrive during this pandemic. Conversely, organizations that didn't leverage became vulnerable to both startling spikes in demand and loss of operations and productivity.

A digital workforce has the potential to coalesce productive business relationships beyond the innate workgroups, enabling knowledge sharing across the organization. But what requires making a workforce digitally ready? One of the key ways is investing in continuous learning. Along with analyzing a company's existing talents and their skills, businesses must focus on their employees' continuous learning by reskilling and up-skilling. A strategic workforce plan is crucial for building a continuous pipeline of high-caliber talent.

By embracing the right digital talent management practices, businesses can build a high-impact digital workforce that will enhance digital business performance and customer experience. A digital workforce can deliver scalability and cost-savings benefits. For instance, human error can cost a company with 100,000 employees US$62.4 million per year.

Scaling Innovation with Digital Workforce

With careful planning, enterprises can scale their breakthrough innovations. A fully scaled digital workforce will enable them to drive productive automation and higher output. Many organizations implement a digital workplace strategy to survive the changes driven by technology. 

In an India-like country, demand for a digital workforce is high. As the country is making significant leaps and bounds towards digital, according to a survey by AWS, the demand for a digitally skilled workforce in India will need to increase nine times by 2025. This means a total of 3.9 billion digital skill training will be required by the same timeframe. Currently, digitally skilled workers represent 12 percent of the workforce in the country. According to the survey, the top in-demand skills are cloud architecture design, cybersecurity, and large-scale data modeling. Included over 500 digital workers and interviewed technology experts, business leaders, and policymakers, the survey report emphasized the demand for more digital workers even in the non-technology sectors such as manufacturing and education. 

The report found that more than 50 percent of digital workers surveyed in the manufacturing sector will require such skills to perform their jobs. On the other hand, the ability to develop digital security and cyber forensics tools and techniques will be a vital skill in the education sector, the report noted.

In brief, as more companies will turn to technology, they require a blended workforce, with a strategic talent pool of both full-time workers and a liquid workforce. This strategic approach, in turn, will boost flexibility, agility, and diversity while scaling the digital readiness of an organization.