Are your employees equipped to support your digital transformation?

Transformation and training needs

Digital transformation, Industry 4.0, disruptive innovation, digitization of processes, machine learning, automation and robotization are all terms, concepts or technologies that today are experiencing a meteoric rise in companies of all types. The global crisis we are going through has certainly acted as a gas pedal to the adoption of certain technologies and/or the launch of ambitious digital transformation projects for many companies. The element that is for me an important point in the equation of the success of any transformation project, and which is unfortunately too often forgotten or simply put aside, is that of the adequate training of employees!

Training is an investment in the business project

As a quick introduction and especially to tell you that I know a lot about the world of training, I had the chance to run an online training company for nearly 15 years. I can confirm that training in companies is sadly too often seen as an expense item and not as an investment with a very high potential for positive benefits for the organization... So imagine how easy it is for organizations that do not see employee training as a vector of performance and a guarantee of sustainability to fall into the trap of simply not considering training their employees, and this, while the company is undergoing the biggest transformation of its existence!

The need for a training plan

Employee training serves many purposes in business, but is it really used and especially seen as an important strategy in a digital transformation process? Personally, I doubt it. In fact, we come across many organizations that have no plan for training their workforce while they are in the midst of digitizing their entire business.

Quite honestly, it's not surprising to find many "lost" or frustrated employees in these companies. Often, in fact, these are companies that are doing a 180-degree turn because they haven't invested enough in technology over the past 20 years and, like many others, are urgently activating a drastic transformation plan across the organization.

Understanding digital literacy

One of the terms that was popularized a few years ago now, but is nothing new, is "digital literacy." Digital literacy refers to the level of knowledge, understanding and ability to apply new technologies of people and especially your employees. The issue here is that new technologies are appearing at an alarming rate and the general population, including your employees, are not really interested in them. This means that in a way, they are subjected to these new technologies without really understanding them and especially that they are not able to extrapolate the potential of these new technologies... This is why digital literacy is a real issue today and even a concern for many organizations that see how far behind their employees are in adopting certain technologies.

4 training areas to succeed in your transformation

My advice is simple: make sure you have a competent training partner to support you in the following major projects:

1. Training your workforce ahead of your digital transformation is crucial to ensure a healthy adoption of the technologies you will implement.
2. The digital literacy of your employees must be sufficient for them to minimally understand the origins and basic operation of the technologies you plan to use.
3. To ensure that you have internal experts or super users (which is essential!) to continue the evolution of the technologies you are considering, you must train them.
4. The transition of your employees to their new responsibilities inevitably requires adequate training! Any digital transformation of a company must include a training/transformation component for which your employees will inevitably have to be accompanied through this change.

Conclusion

In summary, it is essential to design an adequate training strategy for all the stages of your transformation project and also plan long-term support for your employees. Technologies evolve extremely quickly and simply keeping up to date on what can be done or envisaged with certain new technologies can be the small differentiator that will give you the necessary edge over your competitors to win new markets. This is as long as your employees, at all levels, can see and understand the opportunity that is available to them, and without sufficient digital literacy, this is simply impossible!

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