Ever since the shift from stone to metal tools, the world has steadily been moving towards a digital age. However, the rate at which technological developments take place today is expanding exponentially and over the past two years digital adoption and transformation has been accelerated at a rapid pace.
This has had an impact on the workplace, resulting in a shift towards remote and hybrid working environments that empowers anyone to do their best work from anywhere, as well as changes in labour and skills demand. According to the International Finance Corporation, 230m jobs in Sub-Saharan Africa will require digital skills by 2030. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and automation are also transforming the job landscape in a way that is changing the needs and requirements of certain job roles, making existing jobs redundant, and even creating completely new jobs.
As businesses adopt these new and emerging technologies, they also need to acquire the human resources and skills required to support and work with the technology. But, as SA grapples with a substantial digital skills gap, meeting these skills needs is difficult and challenging.
SA’s digital skills gap has steadily changed from a valley to a canyon over the past few years, with many graduates lacking the basic and critical skills needed in the workplace. In 2019, the country recorded a skills mismatch of more than 50%. While we can only speculate at this point, it is likely that these skills challenges have been worsened by the pandemic.
The University of the Witwatersrand's 2021 ICT Skills Survey found that companies in the SA technology sector were finding it hardest to fill vacancies in positions such as software developers, computer network technicians, developer programmers and computer network and systems engineers. Additionally, the most in-demand skills listed by employers are in cybersecurity, big data and analytics, DevOps (a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations), and artificial intelligence.
But, it’s not just the information and communications technology (ICT) sector that isn’t able to meet key digital skills demands. Organisations across industries are struggling to find the right digital skills needed to enable digital innovation, support recovery from the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and drive future growth. Even everyday digital skills covering expertise in areas such as smartphone usage, website browsing, social media and productivity programmes like Word, Excel and Google Docs are in short supply, not just in SA but across the globe.
According to the 2022 Salesforce Global Digital Skills Index, workers surveyed around the world only scored 33 out of 100 points on the digital readiness index that included areas such as access to learning resources, skill level and participation in training. Only 40% of workers felt they were currently very prepared with workplace digital skills, while 34% felt confident they would be in the next five years. Meanwhile, nearly three-quarters of respondents said that they aren’t equipped with the resources needed to learn the digital skills to succeed in a digital workplace.
It’s never been more important to seek out new skills. A fortunate side effect of the past two years of disruption has been the shift towards a more online learning environment on a large scale.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report, online learning and training is on the rise with a fourfold increase in the number of individuals seeking out learning opportunities online through their own initiative, and a five-fold increase in employer provision of online learning opportunities to their employees.
Learning platforms like Trailhead from Salesforce are making digital skills learning fun, easy and accessible by providing anyone with the opportunity to learn critical skills for free online, anywhere and at any time. The platform offers globally recognised credentials that demonstrate their expertise to current and future employers and through the Trailblazer community, learning is not relegated to a silo. There are already more than 3m people who are scaling up their digital skills using Trailhead.
• Fisher is Emerging Markets senior area vice-president at Salesforce
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