The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation of business processes across different sectors. This is because when businesses were forced to operate predominately online, employees – regardless of their occupation and level of digital skills – had to learn and adopt various digital technologies to enable them to complete their daily work. In this situation, what were perceived to be the traditional non-digital occupations did not exist anymore, as digital skills are embedded in pretty much all occupations and across different career fields. In this blog, we will discuss the importance for UK universities to develop the digital technology skills of business students so that they are ready for industry.
As with higher education, there is also an ongoing debate in business sectors on the future of work – in other words, whether and how to integrate digital technologies in business operations in the post-Covid era. Although no consensus agreement has been achieved, it is fairly clear that businesses increasingly require and expect their employees to have a good level of digital skills. This may include basic IT skills/computer literacy, such as office and business processing skills, and/or advanced IT skills such as industry-specific software skills. Nevertheless, the digital skills gap is becoming a huge concern for employers. According to the most recent UK employer skills survey conducted in 2019, 38 per cent of employers found a deficiency in digital skills among their workforce, and, as a result, put upskilling the workforce with digital skills as the key priority (Winterbotham et al., 2020).
