With economic uncertainty, and fears of recession gaining ground, businesses are freezing hiring and laying off employees to keep their costs under control. Even businesses that are not laying off employees are struggling to find the right talent. The talent shortfall is widening in many industries. Industries like cybersecurity are worst affected by this. That is why businesses are investing in DDoS protected dedicated server.
Melanie Kalmar summed it up brilliantly when she said, “Building digital acumen is essential across our organization if we’re going to realize the true potential of what we’re trying to do with digitalization – from the CIO and information systems teams to sales, supply chain, communications, manufacturing, R&D, and more.”
Even if your industry has a huge supply of talent with little demand for it, the talent does not have the right skills to cope with the challenges of the industry. So, how can businesses get over the talent shortfall problem and still succeed with digital transformation? By preparing internal talents for newer roles. How? That is exactly what we will discuss in this article.
In this article, AntiDos will highlight five ways in which you can prepare your internal talent for digital transformation.
How To Prepare Internal Talent For Digital Transformation?
Table of Contents
Here are five tried and tested ways you can use to prepare talent for digital transformation.
- Embrace a Coaching Mindset
Most businesses think that digital transformation is all about technology. What’s even worse is they start to ignore the human element while doubling down on technology and processes. They don’t understand the value of humans in making your digital transformation initiative successful.
At the end of the day, it is the humans that manage the processes and technology. If you don’t train them properly, you can not take full advantage of the processes and technologies, irrespective of how good they might be. That is why it is important to adopt a coaching mindset.
Your coaching programs should be led by experts, based on experiences, and must focus on solving the biggest problems your company faces. Help your employees build their hardcore technical skills as well as soft skills such as communication and negotiations. Not only that, ensure that your coaching programs are not just theory-based but have some practical element to it as well. You don’t want your internal team to complete the coaching program without being able to apply the concepts they have learned.
The best way to do that is to accompany a theory session with a practical demonstration where employees are forced to apply the concept they have learned. This allows them to gain hands-on experience which is much more valuable than just learning about the concepts. The knowledge and hands-on experience they would gain from such a coaching program would be invaluable.
- Develop a Learning Culture
Jim Swanson, Chief Information Officer of Johnson & Johnson has a different take on how to boost the technical skills of internal employees. He thinks that artificial intelligence can help you develop a learning culture in your organization. Not only that, J&J uses artificial intelligence to evaluate the skills of employees but also provides them opportunities to apply those skills as well.
While sharing his experience, he said, “To support building our IT organization’s digital acumen, we implemented a program that uses artificial intelligence to assess our skills. Not only has this given us tremendous transparency into the strengths and gaps in our organization, but it’s also enabled us to keep our team members marketable and empowered. When you have an empowered team, they are more likely to be motivated to bring their best to their work.”
- Adopt See, Do and Teach Approach
Digital transformation demands cultural shifts, specific skill sets, and much more. If your business does not have any one of them, you are bound to struggle with digital transformation. That is why it is important to know what skills your team already has and which ones they need to acquire to succeed with digital transformation.
Similarly, you might have to ditch your existing software and switch to a new platform. This might not seem like good news for many but if your employees understand the benefits of digital transformation, they would see that as a learning opportunity as they get a chance to work on a new platform and learn a lot of new things while doing so.
Yes, the learning curve might be steep but you can easily overcome it by adopting a see, do and teaching approach. Give your team members time to learn and understand how the new system works. Provide them the opportunities to gain hands-on experience and once they become an expert at it, now they can teach those skills to others.
- Train Employees To Leverage Tools
The number of tools enterprises use these days is mind-boggling. Digital transformation will only add to that tally. You can not take full advantage of all these tools if you don’t know how to use them. That is why it is imperative for businesses to train their employees on how to use the tools to their full potential. This way, you can even increase the skill set and technical knowledge of employees who are not technically sound. Irrespective of how good your tools might be, if you don’t know how to maximize their potential, you won’t be able to achieve desired results. - Foster Innovation In-House
When you are preparing your in-house team for digital transformation challenges, give them the freedom to experiment and try new things. Encourage them to challenge the status quo and come up with ideas. This would only happen if you encourage them to fail and learn from it instead of instilling fear of failure in them. Once you provide them a platform where they can freely express themselves, they will accelerate innovation at your company. That is exactly what you want as a business.
How do you train your internal employees to cope with digital transformation challenges? Share it with us in the comments section below.
