Looking within will close the skills gap

The emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies help­ing com­pa­nies to achieve dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion have rad­i­cal­ly dis­rupt­ed work­force require­ments. McK­in­sey pre­dicts 800 mil­lion jobs will be elim­i­nat­ed by 2030 due to automa­tion, which means near­ly one in every four jobs on the plan­et will van­ish. At the same time, dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is cre­at­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of new jobs for those with the right tech­ni­cal skills.

The truth is the skills of the past are dying and there are nowhere near enough skilled peo­ple in the world to fill the new jobs being cre­at­ed. And this para­dox is col­lid­ing with a wor­ry­ing lack of infra­struc­ture to bridge the gap. Accord­ing to research by Udac­i­ty, a glob­al life­long-learn­ing plat­form for career advance­ment, 83 per cent of the Glob­al 2000 report hav­ing a major skills gap and 70 per cent of those com­pa­nies say the skills gap is pre­vent­ing inno­va­tion.

Gart­ner saw in excess of 100 per cent growth in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI), data sci­ence and ana­lyt­ics job post­ings in the five years to 2020. The World Eco­nom­ic Forum pre­dicts the most in-demand dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion jobs will grow 50 per cent a year over the com­ing years. These new jobs fall pre­dom­i­nant­ly into the areas of data (machine learn­ing, data sci­ence, ana­lyt­ics and big data), cloud com­put­ing, robot­ic process automa­tion and cyber­se­cu­ri­ty.

“The dig­i­tal skills gap is extreme­ly cost­ly for busi­ness­es, threat­en­ing their very sur­vival,” says Gabe Dal­por­to, chief exec­u­tive of Udac­i­ty. “Every indus­try is expe­ri­enc­ing sig­nif­i­cant dis­rup­tion. We work with most of the largest glob­al auto­mo­tive com­pa­nies and they are shell shocked right now because of Tes­la. For years, they believed they were in the hard­ware busi­ness; it turns out that mod­ern car com­pa­nies are real­ly in the soft­ware busi­ness and they sim­ply don’t have the skills to deal with that trans­for­ma­tion.

“If com­pa­nies don’t take aggres­sive action, it will be ter­mi­nal for them. From a nation­al eco­nom­ic per­spec­tive, coun­tries like Chi­na are invest­ing heav­i­ly in emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies, craft­ing a future econ­o­my and ensur­ing they have the right skills. West­ern economies are tak­ing a more pas­sive view and risk being dis­rupt­ed and out­ma­noeu­vred in the glob­al econ­o­my.”

Organ­i­sa­tions need sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of high­ly skilled tech employ­ees, but they can’t hire their way out of the prob­lem because the tal­ent doesn’t exist and uni­ver­si­ties pro­duce only a small num­ber of these high­ly tech­ni­cal grad­u­ates every year. Recruit­ing is an unsus­tain­able solu­tion; it’s not even a good stop­gap mea­sure because the demand for these skills is so high.

The far more effec­tive option is to invest in inter­nal upskilling. Udac­i­ty offers Nan­ode­gree pro­grammes with­in sev­en schools: AI, autonomous sys­tems, busi­ness, cloud com­put­ing, cyber­se­cu­ri­ty, data sci­ence, and pro­gram­ming and devel­op­ment.

When Shell need­ed to deploy AI in 70 coun­tries, Udac­i­ty worked with them to cre­ate a cit­i­zen data sci­en­tist career-scal­ing pro­gramme to upskill engi­neers and build its AI skills at scale. One of hun­dreds of AI projects saw data sci­en­tists apply­ing these new skills to stream­ing sen­sor data from rigs and pre­dict­ing main­te­nance mod­els, so they could get replace­ment parts into the field to pre­vent out­ages and save mil­lions per inci­dent.

“Udacity’s learn­ing plat­form offers con­sumers and enter­pris­es the fastest, most effec­tive way to get job-ready skills,” says Dal­por­to. “The sin­gle most impor­tant les­son is tying upskilling to busi­ness-crit­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion ini­tia­tives. If you just make an upskilling cat­a­logue avail­able to your employ­ees, as an HR ben­e­fit, you’re going to fail. You need to under­stand what you’re try­ing to achieve, what are the skills gaps, and then work with a ven­dor that can help you cre­ate learn­ing paths for inter­nal can­di­dates who can fill the gaps and, impor­tant­ly, mea­sure against busi­ness out­comes.

“The days of a one-and-done bachelor’s degree are gone. Enter­pris­es and indi­vid­u­als are going to have to take a much more proac­tive role in con­tin­u­ous­ly evolv­ing their skillsets.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it udacity.com/enterprise

Pro­mot­ed by Udac­i­ty