Hacking Digital 3: How to develop digital skills within your organization 

Checklist

• Are we offering multiple learning formats for our employees?
• Are we aware of the balance between different levels of digital awareness and competence within the workforce?
• Are we incentivizing our employees to share their digital knowledge?
• What skills are people excited to develop?
• Are we making it easy for people to learn on the job?

Six key actions

• Rapid ramp-up

Ramp up digital skills and knowledge quickly through a combination of in-house training, external education, and recruiting external talent (but engage and retrain people first, rather than constantly hiring externally).

• Mind the gaps

Identify information gaps before training and test people afterwards to determine their proficiency with the new knowledge. Reinforce the training until new skills are mastered.

• Create a learning culture

Create a culture of self-directed learning and nurture proactive, lifelong learning. This builds a workforce that learns how to learn continuously on its own.

• Reward risk-taking

Encourage appropriate risk-taking, and reward employees for lessons learned and self-development.

• Foster collaboration

Support collaboration across organizational boundaries and make learning accessible and broadly available.

Hacker’s insights

• Hire more all-rounders

A broad base of transferable skills is more valuable than deep skills in a single area. Hire digital all-rounders who can work with multiple digital technologies and operating environments.

• Offer learning across multiple structures and formats

People learn in different ways, so offer a variety of options, such as classroom learning, online learning, peer-learning, video learning, etc. Learning gaps are also different and should not be targeted in the same way, so provide sufficient diversity to suit different needs.

• Learn from learners

Assemble an advisory group comprising learners from various levels across the organization to inform people about the latest technologies that might impact the business, and ensure that the group gets time on the leadership agenda to share its insights.

• Incentivize learning

Provide inducements for learning, such as resources to pursue learning and for sharing that learning with others. Incentives might also include dedicated time for learning.