ICT Skills Today for Tomorrow’s Information Worker
David Carpenter, CEO of IT skills and certification provider Q-Validus (and former CEO of the ECDL Foundation), makes the case for increasing productivity with a renewed investment in the employee’s ICT capabilities.
Globalisation is facilitating the rapid spread of emerging skills and technologies, requiring an adaptive, flexible workforce that can meet the changing needs of industry. Nowadays as people alternate between working autonomously and working in teams all occupations require a greater breadth of knowledge to enable people to work effectively and smarter. Effective job performance is dependent on the knowledge, skills and abilities of employees.
Advances in technology are increasingly providing users with more opportunities to communicate and collaborate in ways that can dramatically improve efficiency and productivity across organisations, but only if we let it. Those organisations employing staff with inadequate or inappropriate ICT skills will be unable to maximise returns on both human and capital investments. By providing appropriate training to employees businesses can improve productivity and competitiveness by ensuring that their employees have the right skills to do the best job.
Until quite recently most organisations concentrated on ensuring that their employees had the appropriate basic ICT skills required to use common IT office application packages. However, the changing nature of the workplace has driven the demand for and the availability of a range of software applications and tools that are specific to various functional activities within a modern organisation and which can greatly enhance on-the-job performance. ICT skills can provide a platform for what we say, do, show, organise, manage, present and communicate.
For example, an application such as Microsoft Publisher provides an organisation with an easy-to-use Desktop Publishing package that allows the user to produce professional quality, well-designed newsletters, brochures or leaflets to support effective low cost marketing activity as well as organisational communications. Similarly, the effective use of email software for scheduling tasks, making appointments and sharing calendars can greatly enhance communications and collaboration across organisations. In addition, the effective use of such tools enables the organisation to communicate externally in an effective and professional manner through the application of consistent house and branding styles in all external communications.
Search Engine Optimisation techniques and supporting software tools are readily available (though not always effectively used) to enable organisations to support and improve their online presence by optimising websites to increase traffic as well as tracking visitor traffic and facilitating and monitoring e-commerce transactions. There are a range of other tools, such as, project management applications, image editing and web creation software that further support role based activities in the modern workplace.
In short, there is a wide range of applications available to the modern organisation that can effectively support functional activities, such as, marketing, e-commerce, file and document management, planning and project management, internal and external communications. The Expert Group on Future Skills Needs (EGFSN) in its 2007 report Tomorrow’s Skills Towards a National Skills Strategy identified the following skills, which should be included in a generic skills portfolio:
- Basic/fundamental skills: such as literacy, numeracy, IT literacy
- People-related skills: such as communication, interpersonal, team-working and customer-service skills
- Conceptual/thinking skills: such as collecting and organising information, problem solving, planning and organising, learning-to-learn skills, innovation and creativity skills, systematic thinking.
The EGFSN reported: All occupations are becoming more knowledge-intensive, with a corresponding rise in the requirement for qualifications and technical skills. Employees will be required to acquire a range of generic and transferable skills and attitudes. In most cases, work is becoming less routine, with a requirement for flexibility, continuous learning, and individual initiative and judgement.
Millions of people go to work every day without the skills they need to do their jobs effectively, yet they increasingly have access to applications and tools that can greatly enhance their ICT skills and, in turn, their people related and conceptual skills, in ways that can add real value to the organisation.
For many people the line between home and work has blurred over the past decade as technology has increasingly enabled people to access and manage information whether at home, at work or while travelling. Improvements in technology will bring greater convergence between delivery interfaces (PCs, browsers and mobile phones) making it easier for people to communicate and collaborate from any location. Tomorrow’s Information Worker will be a ‘Smart Worker’, equally comfortable working autonomously or as part of a team, working responsibly using a wide range of functional support tools to communicate and collaborate in ways that will greatly improve efficiency and productivity.
Over the past decade the US experienced a structural shift upwards in productivity growth while productivity growth in Europe has gone in the other direction. Economists strongly concur that US productivity growth has been driven by ICT, with the result that US annual GDP has been more than $1.9 trillion greater than it otherwise would have been. Numerous studies have shown that ICT capital investments have a far greater impact on productivity and growth than non-ICT investments.
ICT investment in a wide range of modern end-user application tools combined with a structured staff development plan can enable organisations to make significant cost savings and productivity gains during the current economic downturn leaving them as flexible and responsive entities well positioned to maximise opportunities as we emerge from recession.
The tools already exist to provide today’s worker with the ICT Skills to enable him/her to become tomorrow’s information worker. It is up to Europe to respond to the challenge and close the productivity gap with the US.
The recently launched Computer Wings programme (www.computerwings.com) meets this challenge by delivering role based ICT skills that improve productivity, communication and collaboration across organisations.
