Workforce Skills Gap Preventing Firms From Keeping up With Digital Acceleration

Employers should assess skills and check on data literacy to help meet the increasing demands of digital transformation and plan for 2021

TRUMBULL, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The speed of digital transformation is accelerating but many employers say their people lack the skills to keep up. Too often they don’t have a clear picture of those skills to understand what they are capable of. Questionmark, the online assessment provider, urges employers to start with skills assessments to meet the speed of change.

A global survey of 700 CIOs of large businesses by software firm Dynatrace found that 89% say their digital transformation has accelerated. Nearly 60% say it will continue to speed up.¹ A further study of 4,600 business leaders by technology company Dell Technologies reports that the lack of in-house skills and expertise is one of the top barriers to digital transformation.²

Given the increasing volume of data involved in digital transformation, one of the key skills employees often lack is the ability to analyze and interpret that data. This impacts the employer’s ability to communicate and implement digital strategies.

This will be particularly critical in 2021 when firms will need to bounce back from Covid-19 disruption, and it should be planned for now. Firms that fail to understand the skills of their people risk falling behind their competitors.

Lars Pedersen, CEO of Questionmark, said: “With the pace of digital transformation accelerating, employers should assess and then strengthen the skills of their people and potential recruits. Increasingly employers find that they need their people to be able to understand and communicate data effectively to successfully implement digital transformation.

“Remote assessments can give employers critical information about the skills their employees or recruits have and what training or support they might need. These insights enable employers to unlock their and their employees’ potential and help meet the demands of digital acceleration.”

Questionmark’s enterprise-grade assessment platform helps employers get the information they need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their workforce and make informed people decisions.

With a potential Covid-19 vaccine and a return to economic growth in 2021, employers may need to recruit quickly to meet demand. By assessing candidates before deciding to hire them, employers can ensure that they are recruiting people with the skills they need to meet and exceed the pace of digital transformation.

www.questionmark.com

About Questionmark

Questionmark unlocks performance through reliable and secure online assessments.

Questionmark provides a secure enterprise-grade assessment platform and professional services to leading organizations around the world, delivered with care and unequalled expertise. Its full-service online assessment tool and professional services help customers to improve their performance and meet their compliance requirements. Questionmark enables organizations to unlock their potential by delivering assessments which are valid, reliable, fair and defensible.

Questionmark offers secure powerful integration with other LMS, LRS and proctoring services making it easy to bring everything together in one place. Questionmark's cloud-based assessment management platform offers rapid deployment, scalability for high-volume test delivery, 24/7 support, and the peace-of-mind of secure, audited U.S., Australian and European-based data centers.

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¹ https://www.dynatrace.com/news/press-release/global-cio-report-observability-automation-and-ai/
² https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-gb/perspectives/digital-transformation-index.htm