How to Up-Skill Your Digital Workforce in 2021
This year has seen the shift from working in offices to working from home. That shift has precipitated the engagement of different firms with a number of exciting new tech solutions – many of them designed to help people communicate and collaborate across time and space. And, of course, this has led to bottlenecks, logjams, and other difficulties as staff members struggle to get used to the ‘new normal’ and the new tech that they’ve been asked to use. In this piece, we’ll look at how to ensure that your staff are trained and up-skilled in the digital capabilities they’ll need in 2021.
As a result of COVID and changing the entire setup of your working systems this year, your first concern will likely be the security in your digital infrastructure. Is cybersecurity a bigger concern for you in 2021 or a smaller one? For most firms, remote work means that there are plenty of different and novel ways in which someone might breach your firm’s database or backend. That means training your staff in the best practice cybersecurity behavior will help your organization to protect from these threats.
The cloud is a majestic feature of the modern business world – and in the past ten years, it’s revolutionized how we do business. As such, it’s the firms with the best engagement with cloud software and cloud computing who often have the highest levels of productivity – especially when working remotely, where files are saved on the cloud and not on physical servers. This means that putting your staff through a course in Azure Fundamentals – if you use Microsoft software – will help your firm to understand and leverage cloud computing for the better in 2021.
AI is likely to become something that most offices dabble with in 2021. Not the kind of AI you see in the films – but smart computing solutions that can perform complex but mundane tasks in a split second, saving your staff members hours of labor and delivering astonishing results and savings to your firm. To really engage with this new technology, you need a large number of your staff to be comfortable using it – and that means AI training. Happily, you can find great starter-pack training session in AI online, and there are several useful YouTube tutorials, too, which offer a brief introduction to the technology.
Your software is likely to be profuse throughout your business. You’ll maintain software that helps you track activity on your website, software that tracks sales and makes orders and even software that tracks the work of your employees. The result is often a tangle of different apps and programs scattered across your different departments. For your staff to use these most effectively, it’s worth considering putting together a brief internal course on how your software programs interact and overlap. That way, workers will be able to navigate through your own business’s digital landscape as efficiently and effectively as possible in 2021.
When considering how to up-skill your workforce for the coming year, bear in mind the four key technologies that’ll shape 2021 – all of them listed above.
