To plug the 670m worker skills gap, APAC needs to rethink training

Agile, personalized and mandated as a whole-of-organization crux: here is a training/reskilling strategy to nip the gap in the bud.

The Asia Pacific region (APAC) is facing a digital skills shortage that is growing daily with accelerated digital transformation. This widening skills gap threatens the region’s growth, and by 2025, 670m additional digital workers will be needed to fill that gap: a five-fold increase in the region’s digital workforce.

Cloud skills programs are urgently required, and all corners of the economy will need to contribute, including governments, the education sector, private companies, and non-profits.

According to PwC’s 20th CEO Survey, more than 50% of APAC respondents indicated it was difficult to hire digital talent with the right skills. Furthermore, IDC predicts that this year, the monetary losses resulting from IT skills gaps will be US$775bn worldwide.

Organizations that are intentional about providing training and career-growth opportunities will continue to see a corporate return on that investment, from increased customer spend and higher close rates, to sales-cycle acceleration and improvements in customer retention.

Getting skills training right

We hear from CEOs and CTOs regularly that their most important customer metric is ‘time to value’—regardless of the industry. Increasing this metric requires experimentation, which starts with making sure teams have the right skills.

While it is not complicated, building an environment that encourages continuous learning does take time. However, organizations intent on providing training and career-growth opportunities find that they lead to greater empowerment to innovate with whatever new service or product is launched next.

This is where personalized training can become standard. In the pandemic era, gone are the days of straight-out-of-the-box, once-a-year training for teams. Instead, to keep pace with innovation and remain competitive, organizations are turning to personalized and agile digital training experiences to create a culture of continuous learning.

Through a combination of instruction, technology and digital content, personalized training is becoming the new standard of training for keeping employees engaged and their skills fresh. Personalized training removes the one-size-fits-all approach ensuring employees are training according to their specific needs. This improved training results in increases in confidence among employees and leads to a more innovative and collaborative work environment.

Cloud skills training beyond IT

In today’s global business environment, not many roles do not require some technology expertise for proper execution. Organizations are finding that building cloud expertise empowers people in sales, marketing, finance, HR, and beyond.

In a recent Amazon survey, 83% of tech workers and 76% of non-tech workers who had participated in skills training indicated that the training had improved their employability by allowing them to keep up to date with the latest technologies.

For example, business systems analysts can use the cloud to find new opportunities for growth; and program managers can incorporate cloud software into their overall strategy execution.

This year, as interest and implementation in cloud migration continues to grow, organizations will increasingly turn to a whole-of-organization approach to ensuring their employees—regardless of department—understand the role that cloud computing plays within the organization’s overall business strategy.

While digital transformation has the power to drive economies, build wealth, and alleviate poverty, getting it right begins with skilled workers, and we encourage industry and government to take further action to facilitate continual training where everyone in the organization tackles the issue together, to provide personalized training programs to suit every budget and level of technical proficiency.