Employees are concerned when assessing their own digital skills and the lack of training resources currently available to them within their workplace, a new research shows.
The report “The Digital Talent Gap—Are Companies Doing Enough?” analyses the demand and supply of talent with specific digital skills and the availability of digital roles across multiple industries and countries.
Highlights of the research conducted by Capgemini and LinkedIn include the fact that nearly 50% of employees (close to 60% for digitally talented employees) are investing their own money and additional time beyond office hours to develop digital skills on their own.
Every other organisation surveyed acknowledged that the digital gap is widening. Over half (54%) of the organizations agreed that the digital talent gap is hampering their digital transformation programs and that their organization has lost competitive advantage because of a shortage of digital talent.
Even though the talent gap has widened, budgets for training digital talent have remained flat or decreased in more than half (52%) of the organizations, and 50% said they keep talking about the digital talent gap but not doing much to bridge it.
Skill redundancy concerns could drive attrition
Many of today’s employees are concerned that their skills are either already redundant or soon to become so.
Overall, 29% of employees believe their skill set is redundant now or will be in the next one to two years, while more than a third (38%) consider their skill set will be redundant in the next four to five years.
Specifically, almost half (47%) of Generation Y and Z employees believe that their current skill set will be redundant in the next four to five years.
From an industry perspective, 48% of employees in the automotive sector think that their skill set will be redundant in the next four to five years, followed by the banking sector (44%), utilities (42%), telecom and insurance (both 39%), according to the report.
Employees also feel organisations’ training programs are not hugely effective. More than half of today’s digital talent say that training programs are not helpful or that they are not given time to attend. Close to half (45%) describe their organisation’s training programs as “useless and boring.”
Skill redundancy concerns and lack of faith in an organization’s upskilling efforts have the potential to trigger attrition.
More than half of digitally talented employees (55%) say they are willing to move to another organisation if they feel their digital skills are stagnating at their current employer, while close to half of employees (47%) are likely to gravitate towards organisations that offer better digital skill development.
However, employers noted they are also worried about attrition of upskilled staff. Just over half of employers (51%) believe their employees will leave their organisation after they receive training and half (50%) say their digital skills training sessions are not well attended.
Claudia Crummenerl, head of executive leadership and change at Capgemini, said: “Organisations face a mammoth task in terms of digital upskilling. Given that skill redundancy is a key concern among our employee respondents, ensuring a clear development path is essential to address this.
“In the future, the digital talent gap will continue to widen and no company can sit back and be comfortable. Organisations need to be consistently innovating and planning their workforce evolution.”