While digital skills are set to gain importance in business in the coming years, the job market still needs to solve the current shortage. In addition to increasing the demand for IT skills, the digital transformation of the past two years has also left people with less technical backgrounds struggling with new tools.
According to a BVA survey on the state of mind of the French towards digital, if they welcome the advantages it brings, such as simplification (35%) and daily opportunities (29%), however, they are 52% cited a negative qualifier: 28% feel a form of complexity in the face of this technology, and 17% even experience exasperation.
Thus testifying to a somewhat ambivalent relationship with digital. The talent shortage has been a reality for the past ten years, but the phenomenon continues to accelerate as the job market changes. According to a study by Robert Half, 66% of recruiters believe finding qualified employees is likely to be a real challenge by 2024.
These elements highlight the need for employees to constantly develop their existing skills, whose attractiveness on the labor market would last, on average, about five years. The idea for organizations is not to recruit new talent by neglecting the potential of their existing employees. Above all, companies must consider this an opportunity to offer their staff access to training and development programs to make their profiles more attractive over time.
A Digital Mentality
Digital has probably risen further in the ranks of leaders’ priorities in the wake of the pandemic. While laudable, this drive to provide their people with the right tools to work faster and smarter often results in an over-focus on the digital part of the equation at the expense of the transformation part.
However, generally, the failures of transition projects are not due to destructive technologies and a lack of enthusiasm on the part of employees but instead to the fact that companies need to invest in the training of their workforce. , who end up with advanced technologies that they are unable to master.
Even the best technologies in the world have no value in the hands of insufficiently qualified users. By training their employees to master innovative tools and services, companies will make them more autonomous and enable them to develop new skills. These employees can sometimes discover creative ways to use these tools and find new use cases to speed up their processes and improve collaboration. This is a very example of a scenario where everyone’s a winner!
Whether it seeks to innovate by adopting new practices or to optimize its operations, the organization must ensure that digital is at the heart of all its activities. With such a mentality, companies can train their employees with less technical profiles so that they can collaborate with qualified IT specialists. This requires training existing staff to use approved platforms (e.g., no-code / low-code) to develop business applications instead of turning to solutions that have yet to be validated beforehand.
Such platforms help companies accelerate their digital transformation initiatives by enabling more citizen developers with no particular experience in technology to collaborate with IT professionals to develop professional applications. With this approach, there is no longer any need for qualified IT personnel to have additional business expertise in a specific field of activity.
The organization provides its business users with the tools and skills to design solutions. This solves the problem of the need for more available software developers and promotes better collaboration between departments, thus improving the company’s overall performance.
Support Your Workforce With Low-Code
Armed with low-code tools, business users can now help their organization adapt to the growing demand for solutions as digital technologies rapidly transform business. Indeed, these platforms make it possible to digitize processes and find new ways of carrying out daily operations more quickly than with traditional development processes.
Business users can thus become more involved in digital transformation projects. All of this is especially important given the tendency among contemporary employees to solve their business problems with data and practicality. Most employees now want to participate in activities that create real value for the company and thus make their efforts more relevant. This need is also significant enough in their eyes to justify a departure if this opportunity is missed.
Using low-code platforms, companies can create an environment open to everyone’s ideas and send a message that demonstrates the willingness of leaders to work hand in hand with their employees. Now able to design solutions via a dedicated development platform, business users have more say in the areas or situations where digitalization could benefit their organization.
With low code, IT teams can also increase their productivity and efficiency since they no longer have to engage in lesser development tasks constantly. On a practical level, users generally only need a little programming expertise to run or create applications on these platforms since they essentially use a visual interface that allows them to design tools or solutions by simply moving components with a mouse. Therefore, IT teams are under less intense pressure and can focus on more complex projects.
Thanks to citizen developers, organizations can now take transformation initiatives without increasing the pressure on their IT teams and thus increase the satisfaction rate of their staff (technical or not). By providing them with low-code tools, they offer them the possibility of designing applications and software that are useful for their daily activities.
For these organizations, it’s one of the best ways to retain talent in a world where contributing something significant and relevant matters more than compensation. Using low-code tools to support the retraining or training of existing talent provides them with an opportunity to address the short- and long-term digital skills shortage.
