Continual Adaptability > Digital Transformation

I had the opportunity to meet with and hear Mike Hendrickson, V.P. of Technology and Developer Products at Skillsoft, during their Perspectives 2019 user conference. Mike joined Skillsoft last July after long stints at O'Reilly Media, Pearson Education, and Addison Wesley Professional.

Mike is a big believer in organizations focusing on continual adaptability rather than digital transformation since every company will be adapting to changes like new markets, new technology, and ever-changing customer expectations until they are no longer in business. From Mike's perspective, about 20% of the companies are good at continuously adapting, innovating at an order of magnitude with a customer-centric empowered workforce.

The continuously adaptable business needs evenly distributed employees with ever-evolving skills, building blocks, and problem solvers. Adaptability is synonymous with continuous learning. 

While 83% of CEOs expect the role of AI, robotics, and automation to increase significantly over the next two years, only 24% see jobs going away. The vast majority see demand for new skills and new jobs. Talent is critical and will be critically low in the future. There is already a dearth of security and data science professionals.

An inability to learn and grow is the reason 20% of people look for another job. 25% of most employees' days are spent on email and other collaboration tools like Slack. Active learning and learning strategies will be a high-demand skill.

As such, companies today need to be providing employees with continuous learning opportunities so they can upskill, reskill, and reinvent themselves. Develop targeted reskilling programs, upskill on an enterprise scale, give everyone in the organization an opportunity, and align education with the skills needs of the business. Provide all employees with the superpowers they need to be successful: communication, negotiation, and the ability to provide business value in their role.

The Skillsoft Aspire program is giving technologists who may have a data analyst background the skills, exposure to the roles and functions, and the training to take them all the way from data analyst, to data wrangler, to data ops professional, to data scientist. 

In today's world, everyone needs a cursory understanding of technology and data, as well as a common understanding of what their company does with technology that makes them unique.