Develop digital skills to improve staff, business and the economy

Over the last few years, this column has unashamedly championed the drive towards developing greater digital skills within the workforce to benefit the economy. Yet despite increasing evidence of the importance of developing competences in this area, there still seems to be little impetus to invest in this area by both the public and private sectors.

For example, a recent National Audit Office report showed that only 4% of civil servants are digital professionals as compared with an average of between 8% and 12% in other sectors. More worryingly, the number of digital, data and technology apprentices in the civil service between 2021 and 2022 has gone down by 20% suggesting that there is little new talent being developed within government departments.

In addition, research commissioned by Virgin Media O2 Business showed that nearly a fifth of businesses are still being held back by limited digital skills or employee resistance to new technology. In fact, over half of employees questioned reported that their organisation is suffering from a skills shortage with 83% of them worried about the impact it will have on the business.

As a new study from Gallup and Amazon Web Services of 30,000 workers from nineteen countries around the world has shown, investing in advanced digital skills could raise global economic prosperity by over £5 trillion every year as well as benefiting those individuals who are supported to develop those skills.

For example, the average worker with advanced digital skills in high-income countries earns 50% more than those who were not using digital skills. Three quarters of the same group also expressed high job satisfaction and had higher confidence in their job security as compared to less than half of workers who only use basic digital skills.

And workers offer a variety of reasons for their widespread interest in digital skills training e.g. it makes them more efficient in doing their work, earns them a higher salary, improve their employability, increases their opportunities for promotion and improves their job security.

Businesses also benefit from a greater use of advanced digital skills, digital technologies, and cloud technology with those reporting high levels of digital skill utilisation having annual revenues that are 168% higher than companies that do not.

They are also more innovative with three quarters of organisations that employ advanced digital workers introducing a new product in the past two years. Two thirds of companies that run some or most of their business on the cloud also reported that they had been innovating in the past two years, a rate roughly five times higher than the companies that do not use the cloud.

In the UK, the research found that one of the biggest challenges is closing the skills gap to enable the digital economy to reach its full potential. Currently, 72% of businesses surveyed in the UK have a vacancy for workers with digital skills but only 11% of UK workers possess advanced digital skills. More than two thirds of businesses also find it challenging to hire the digital workers they need mainly due to a shortage of qualified applicants.

But it is not only the digital skills of today that are challenging businesses and two thirds of employers state that emerging technologies such as 5G, the Metaverse, blockchain and artificial intelligence will become a vital part of their operations in the future. Unfortunately, a third of workers with basic digital skills had no knowledge of these emerging technologies although the majority are actually interested in gaining those skills if they were supported to do so.

However, they face several impediments from their employers including lack of time to acquire the relevant training and a lack of financial resources to pay for the support needed. In fact, the lack of a coherent approach to digital skills by businesses has resulted in over half of those interested in additional training reporting that their digital skills were self-taught.

Therefore, the message is again a clear and simple one, namely that investing in digital skills will help improve individual workers, businesses, and the overall economy. Yet, this whole agenda remains one in which politicians and policymakers are doing little to address the issue despite the clear benefits to productivity and competitiveness.

That must change and if the UK economy is to take full advantage of the digital revolutions that are changing our personal and professional lives every day, then it must ensure that its workforce is trained and ready for this task not only in the digital skills required today but also those needed in the future.