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The pursue of digital technologies to garner more values is dramatically reshaping all industries. Businesses globally are taking major leaps to keep up with the pace of change in order to remain competitive. In all these transformations, there is a need for business leaders to consider technology talent. While organizations pour huge capital towards developing their products and services as well as to acquire disruptive technologies, these can be ineffective with the lack of appropriate talent.

Today, most companies are struggling to get the right talent that is suitable for their business and digital transformation initiative. Certainly, finding such talent is a complex job. It is expected that the demand for talent to deliver on new capabilities will significantly exceed supply in the next five years.

Thus, to stay ahead of the game in the technology race, businesses need to look at the training of existing employees, focusing on the development of skills in-house to address the disparity between the demand and supply for talent.

Making Digital Literacy Imperative

For every organization, digital literacy should be the foundation that can help build existing as well as new employees’ skill sets. Digital literacy means to have a basic understanding of platforms, application and collaborative tools used in their organization; not mandatory to have technical skills. According to the American Library Association (ALA), digital literacy is the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.

Digital literacy can become a part of a company culture with increased communication and dedicated learning. To do so, organizations need more conversations about talent while shifting to adopt or own a digital system.

Developing and Retaining Talent

Acquiring new talent in any organization requires capital and, more important, it is a time-consuming task. Thus to ease this challenge, McKinsey suggests to develop and retain the team companies have. In addition to all the traditional people-management levers (competitive compensation, rewards for success, effective coaching, and so on), the company found that leading organizations implement a range of other approaches to develop and retain technology talent, including rotate high performers, make training less technical, ensure senior exposure, support technology passions, and facilitate outside exposure.

Skill Assessment

Using quality skill assessments help filter out extraneous candidates in the initial phase of hiring tech talent. Even, companies can use cloud-enabled tech platforms for skill development that can help identify where skills gaps exist. Leveraging data collected from that process to understand where up-skilling is required enables germane and efficient training procedures. By performing skill assessments, companies can ensure that new candidates, as well as their current employees, have the required skills to successfully perform the jobs and are fit for their digital transformation journey. Additionally, understanding what talent is needed starts with understanding the capabilities of employees and this is done through skill assessment.

Furthermore, having the right technical talent can be a game-changer for organizations. In a McKinsey report, acquiring top technical talent can bloom faster results and considerable cost savings by expediting the digital transformation process by 20 percent to 30 percent.