Paramjit Uppal, Founder and CEO AND Digital
Digital growth continues to accelerate across the public and private sectors. Organisations of all shapes and sizes rely on technology more than ever for business continuity and innovation to better understand and engage with customers.
Keeping up with the pace of acceleration for digital solutions and products – and ensuring there is tech talent with the skills to match this level of output – remains a critical challenge.
Unsurprisingly, the drive to increase digital capabilities has led to an unprecedented demand for digital skills. This gap in capabilities and skills is not new, however. It has been a challenge for more than a decade, but due to the combined need for speed and growth, it is now holding back organisations from building agility in their teams which is required to realise their digital ambitions. What can companies do to act now?
The digital skills gap is more than tech skills. At AND Digital, we have identified a unique set of attributes that organisations need to adopt to make meaningful progress. Implementing agile ways of working, embedding a digital-first culture and providing talent with continuous learning opportunities, are some of the ground rules.
We believe every business is now a tech business, with software and data at its core. However, tech alone is not enough, it is still a human activity. We believe businesses need their own people to innovate, successfully compete and delight their customers. That’s why we work very hard to build and nurture a mindset and capabilities to enable high performance. This investment in people has delivered great speed and agility for us.
This knowledge and strategic approach is what we apply to clients, working with them to accelerate their immediate digital needs and supporting them in building their in-house capabilities. This is all in the face of the well-publicised challenge of the ‘digital skills gap’ which is front and centre of our concerns.
Our approach is all about collaboration. When we build teams, we build them with our clients. It is a shared commitment to a shared problem, when the right patterns, culture and mindsets are harnessed. What’s more, there is no better way for clients to access these for themselves than by working and doing so alongside us.
Digital transformation holds the promise of greater business agility through people. Make the investment in your people and your business will successfully grow.
For more information, visit the AND Digital team at DigitalScotland on October 25 at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.
