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Hybrid working: organisational development
Hybrid working: organisational development

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6 The digital strategy for Wales

The Digital Strategy for Wales aims to address how to use digital, data and technology to improve the lives of people in Wales.

‘Digital offers the potential to make our experience of the world better: enhancing people’s lives, strengthening the delivery of public services and the work of government, as well as helping businesses to adapt to the future.’

(Source: Digital strategy for Wales)

This vision of the digital strategy is improving the lives of everyone through collaboration, innovation and better public services. There are six missions to support the vision:

Table 5
Mission 1: digital services Deliver and modernise services so that they are designed around user needs and are simple, secure and convenient.
Mission 2: digital inclusion Equip people with the motivation, access, skills and confidence to engage with an increasingly digital world, based on their needs.
Mission 3: digital skills Create a workforce that has the digital skills, capability and confidence to excel in the workplace and in everyday life.
Mission 4: digital economy Drive economic prosperity and resilience by embracing and exploiting digital innovation.
Mission 5: digital connectivity Services are supported by fast and reliable infrastructure.
Mission 6: data and collaboration Services are improved by working together, with data and knowledge being used and shared.
Source: Digital strategy for Wales

The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, A Prosperous Wales wellbeing goal specifically focuses on the skills for the future: ‘Encouraging organisations to develop a skilled population, fit for future technological change’. Digital skills for the future are essential for ensuring that not only organisations thrive, but that communities and nations protect future generations.

Activity 18: Understanding the digital strategy for Wales and Skills for the future

Timing: 25 minutes

Watch the video 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
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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.
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Note what this might mean for your organisation and for HEIs more widely, not only in terms of the digital skills that are required, but also what it may mean for the digital transformation of your institute.

If you are not based in Wales, you may wish to search for the digital strategy for the country that you are based in.