1 Why digital skills matter

Watch the video in which contributors share why digital skills and capabilities matter, the impact of the digital skills shortage and the digital skills organisations require.

Download this video clip.Video player: hyb_5_2022_sept101_why_digital_skills_matter.mp4

Show transcript | Hide transcript

Transcript

MATT WINTLE

When I think about the types of skills and knowledge that a business is going to need to be able to run effectively into the future, you can't deny that digital and data are going to be ubiquitous skills and knowledge that people will need across the business.

But it's not that simple. It's a very simple thing to say, well, let's retrain everybody so they understand data and digital. Well, how do you do that and what do you actually mean by that? Certainly, in a business of our size, there are so many different types of employee. And actually, there are businesses within the business.

Our claims department is very different to our IT department. So, it's not a one size fits all. But the recognition that this is coming, and you have to do something about it is really important. I think then what you need to do is understand the roles that you've got and what knowledge they need.

So, for example, in our business, somebody who is working in the call centre, what do they need to know about data? Well, they need to have an understanding about what the business is talking about when it talks about machine learning and AI and rating models and all of those things.

But they don't really need to know how to do it, and they don't need to know in depth of it. But that understanding is really good for them, because it'll help them understand some of the solutions that we put out and the products that we sell. The industry is catching up in terms of technology, but we're looking to redress that balance now and make sure that we give our internal staff the opportunity to go for some of these roles.

Because these roles are where the future is. The future is data and digital. It's inevitable that that's where we're heading. So, you want your people to develop those skills and move into those areas. So, that's what we do. We offer people opportunity, but we acknowledge that sometimes that's not always going to be the answer. And we try and strike that balance the best we can.

GEMMA HALLETT

Actually, 90% of Fintech jobs are tech jobs. The Fin is already taken care of by the organisation or by the founder or whatever it might be. The finance part of it is already done. We need now, coders, engineers, testers, to go and build these products out, scale these products in Wales. And we don't have the talent pipeline.

So, this awareness piece that is part of our strategy is to help raise awareness of Fintech as a viable career option and what those jobs could look like right here in Cardiff. Right. Build around the bigger companies, the admiral principalities, all these start-ups, all these high energy, high scaling, huge opportunities. And that's now, we're just on the take-off of this.

And over the next two or three years, I think Fintech is going to be a priority sector with so much support from the Government and from a collective of companies that I really think it can fly. And for me, it's about making everybody aware that there could potentially be a job for them.

The other side of our strategy is the skill shortages right now. We have a dire skill shortages. It's those kind of lower entry-level jobs we can find talent for. But it's those more acute skill jobs. Like I said before, we haven't done the work to build up that talent pool in Wales yet. So, the awareness piece will do that, but how do I find the talent today? How do I help these Fintechs in Wales find people to employ today to fill these skill shortages? And it's incredibly difficult, because the talent doesn't exist, or it’s being shipped around from one member to the other.

Or jobs are going overseas, and that's the last thing we want. It's really hard to generalise digital skills, because it really depends on the destination the young person or the employee's going. Technology is so different in the workplace. I see it all the time with our innovative start-up, high growth, fast moving companies, start-ups. Exciting places to work of the latest technology.

And then I see maybe, for want of a better position, I'll pick the local authority. I've walked into council buildings, where they're using big desktop monitors, keyboard, and mouse. It's just that if that's the world of work people are going into, then that's a different skill set, especially a digital skill set than the ones for high, fast-growing, fast-moving companies.

So, it depends on where the destination is of what's needed in terms of skill set and how do we achieve that. It's hard to define it in there at school level. But we're also seeing it in the care sector as well. That's gone from writing down daily reports and leaving it in the kitchen, especially in domestic care, where care workers are gone from using pen and paper to now there's an iPad mounted there. And they're having to record everything digitally.

And the skill shortage there, when it comes to digital skills, is huge. The training they have to do to bring somebody that's been in care for the last 10, 20, 30 years to be able to use an iPad and the apps that they use to monitor everything. That's the way the care sector is going, so that needs that skill set as well.

NICOLA ASKHAM

It's really important to help people understand what data they have and then manage it correctly, so it's good enough quality to support good decisions. Data is an interesting term, and it's quite interesting how many people don't actually understand what it is when they're talking about it

Data literacy is a relatively new term, but I don't think the concept is relatively new. So, what it means in the same way that you and I can read books and understand what these words mean, we get to the same degree of confidence with data.

I think it's fair to say that a majority of people either don't think about data as being part of their job, or if they do, it's a kind of necessary evil or an inconvenience. It makes their life harder as far as they're concerned, whereas I feel that nearly everybody in an organisation has some responsibility for either producing data or using data and doing perhaps a bit of both.

So, what is really important is that people understand the value of the data that they're using as part of their day-to-day job, that they recognise it as an asset, and manage it as an asset.

DR NICK BARRETT

Something we all discovered overnight when the pandemic first struck was that we all needed a different range of digital skills. And I think that's been one of the big learning curves. There are some digital literacy skills, and there are some digital capability skills, which are out there.

But we never thought to apply that to ourselves. Getting used to Teams, for example, as the main means of running a meeting was really quite stressful for a lot of people. And of course, there's a whole range of other skills about doing more work in a paperless environment, making sure that we're storing our content and sharing it effectively, being able to think about digital planning, digital workshops.

So, some of this is organisational, some of it is using new software packages. Some of it is just simply working out the new etiquette. Even now, we have people still on mute or not raising hands. And we'll get there eventually. But once again, it was a real wake up call, if you like, to how many students experience the OU.

This for the first time was us looking through the mirror in the different direction. And that's really sharpened our focus, not just on the skills we need to bring new people into the OU, but how important those skills are when we encourage our students to study with us.

And in many ways, these skills are life skills. These aren't just skills that help you study, these are skills that employers will be looking for. So, building more tools to help people and sharing those tools, of course, to help people with their daily digital lives as more and more of society remains digital. This could be, I think, the greatest or most lasting legacy of the pandemic for the OU.

SARAH JONES

It's hugely important that we raise the digital capabilities of students and staff for a variety of reasons. Most immediately is that we're preparing our students for a very digital workforce. So, digital skills have to be integral to the curriculum. For staff to be able to deliver this and for professional services staff to be able to support this, they also need to have those same levels of digital skills. We're sending people into a increasingly digital environment.

DR BECKI VICKERSTAFF

I think digital capability as a whole, there's no kind of differentiation initially between the staff and the students in terms of that digital capability. If we think outside of the education sector initially, if we look at just our digital world, pretty much everything we need to do is needing to be done online. If we think about even paying our car tax, things like that, that requires us to be able to do these things online.

So, it's having that awareness of the appropriate technology and the appropriate techniques to be able to – again, it's about thriving successfully in a digital world – but also that having that awareness of where our own digital capabilities lie is really important.

And I think with staff and students initially, I think there is a bit of a consensus, if you like, that when students come into the university, they're very naturally digitally literate, if you like. They're very happy with it. But whether that's necessarily true, I think what we have to understand is it's about the correct use of these digital technologies and it's about supporting staff and students.

And it doesn't really matter what role you're in, I think there is this generic need for digital capability across any role, and that could be anyone across a role in an institution, whether that's somebody in your senior leadership team, whether that's a teacher, whether that's an administration member of staff. It doesn't really matter.

And I think it's having that – and this is where that framework is great – because it has that building block that you can build on. And then you do that further in-depth work to identify where you can help with those interventions as well. And that's what we see a lot of our institutions doing.

End transcript

Download

 

Now consider the following and add your thoughts in the box below:

• What were the skills they highlighted as being most important?
• How has the digital world evolved?
• What skills do you feel need to be developed by your organisation and yourself?

Read Section 5 of A journey to a prosperous Wales and then watch the video below, in which Sophie Howe, The Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, explains the skills that will be required for the future.

Download this video clip.Video player: hyb_1_2022_sept123_skills_for_the_future_compressed.mp4

Show transcript | Hide transcript

Transcript

SOPHIE HOWE

It’s so important for us to be thinking about the sorts of skills that are going to be relevant for people to be able to enter into the world of work in the future, but also to lead good lives. And the world of work is changing exponentially. We know that we have a huge number of skills gaps in industries that we will need to meet our climate targets, for example.

We know that digital is becoming increasingly important. And yet, perhaps in our schools, the digital skills are not as good as they could be. We know that, increasingly, rote learning and regurgitation of knowledge are not the sorts of things that people are going to need in the future. Already, automation and artificial intelligence is outperforming humans in terms of knowledge.

And so the things that we will need to focus on are those human skills, so the things that robots can’t do, cooperation, collaboration, teamwork, empathy, critical thinking. And that means that our whole education system is going to have to shift from where it has been in the past towards helping people to develop those skill sets. It also means that lifelong learning is going to have to become the new normal if we are all to keep up with the changing nature of technology and the changing nature of work.

So we need a big shift in the way in which we’re thinking about skills for the future if we’re going to meet our climate change targets. We know that across the industries in terms of the jobs that are going to be essential to meet those decarbonisation targets, there are huge skills gaps. So we’ve got gaps in terms of skills for people working in nature, gaps in terms of skills of engineers, the people who are going to install our electric vehicle infrastructure, the people who are going to be rebuilding our public transport networks.

And my analysis shows that there are the possibility of creating around 26,000 new jobs in the green economy here in Wales in the next two years. But we need to do that quickly in order to be able to deliver against our climate change targets. We also need to do it in a purposeful way because at the moment, the people who occupy those industries are predominantly white men.

And there is a risk that if we do not focus on targeting underrepresented groups, women, disabled people, those from Black ethnic minority communities into those jobs, there’s a real risk that we exacerbate existing inequality in the workforce. If we get this right, however, there’s a real opportunity for us to be tackling inequality whilst also doing what we need to do to meet our climate change targets.

End transcript

Download

 

How might your organisation contribute to raising the digital skills for those within it and for future generations?

Add your thoughts in the box below.