WINSTON CHURCHIL QUOTES DATABASE SOFTWARE
Sure, the recruitment market is hot for cybersecurity analysts, software engineers, and data scientists. Focus on soft skills: Just as digital transformation is more about people rather than technology, the key technological skills are soft skills rather than hard skills.The main implication is that when leaders think about investing in technology, they should first think about investing in the people who can make that technology useful. It’s really quite simple: the most brilliant innovation is irrelevant if we are not skilled enough to use it, and even the most impressive human minds will become less useful if they don’t team up with tech. If we can leverage human adaptability to reskill and upskill our workforce, then we can simultaneously augment humans and technology. But the creative aspect of innovation is entirely dependent on people. This is why innovation is commonly described as creative destruction. Just as technological disruption has generally led to automation and the elimination of outdated jobs, it has also always created new jobs. Put people first: Technology is always about doing more with less, yet that combination is effective only if you pair technology with the right human skills.Here’s how we can all prepare for that eventuality: If anything, an even bigger proportion of jobs, tasks, activities, and careers will find ingenious and novel ways to coexist in the digital world. Just as our past efforts have enabled us to adapt to our more digital and virtual present world (and a non-trivial fact is that we are writing this, and you are probably reading this, in physical isolation), there are few reasons to suggest that this trend will go away or be reversed anytime soon. Our main assumption here is straightforward: While the future is more ambivalent and uncertain than ever, we are confident that a pretty strong bet on the future is to focus on reskilling and upskilling people so that they are better equipped to adjust to change. With this in mind, we wanted to provide a few suggestions: some based on science, and some based on our own experiences leading, coaching, and mentoring current and future leaders across a wide range of industries, helping them ready themselves for an even-more-digital future. To be sure, it is too soon for most people to realize this, yet in the long-term, a significant number of people will likely end up in better careers and look back on their less meaningful and less engaging past careers like someone who looks back without regret on the end of a less fulfilling personal relationship, even one where it wasn’t their choice to exit. Perhaps this is the biggest gift of the current pandemic, that it provides us with the opportunity to rethink our potential and ensure that we are positioning ourselves toward the future. As Winston Churchill once said, we should never waste a good crisis. An even bigger loss is that we may go through our entire working lives without discovering, let alone unlocking, our true potential. This is good in the short run, because we can do our jobs on autopilot, freeing up mental resources yet it’s counterproductive in the long run, because what we gain in experience, we miss in new learning opportunities. You can pretty much buy any technology, but your ability to adapt to an even more digital future depends on developing the next generation of skills, closing the gap between talent supply and demand, and future-proofing your own and others’ potential.Īs it turns out, most of us end up in jobs and careers for serendipitous reasons, and stay in them for a long time, rarely pausing to rethink our potential: Am I in the right job? Is my career the best fit for by interests and abilities? Would I enjoy my life more if I had chosen something else? Furthermore, while every job requires learning, we are prewired for familiarity, routine, and simplicity, which is why most of us end up learning less on the job, the more time we actually spend on the job. As The Economist recently noted, one of the most obvious consequences of the current Covid-19 pandemic will be “the infusion of data-enabled services into ever more aspects of life.” We expect digital transformation to be an even bigger imperative for organizations in the short-term future.Ĭontrary to popular belief, digital transformation is less about technology and more about people.