There’s no conversation around the recent digital transformation that doesn’t stem from the effects of the pandemic, which saw some businesses fold and others thrive.
Those who saw their vulnerabilities and were able to transform from them not only had a positive impact on their customers, but for their staff as well. From this experience, the demand for staff who are both literate in IT and business languages are greater than ever before.
On the latest episode of The Best Run Podcast, we welcomed Senior Lecturer of Information Systems and Director of the SAP ACC, Scott Bingley, and Lis Miller, Training and Adoption Lead at SAP ANZ, to discuss the digital skills of the future and how you can pivot your digital transformation with SAP.
Over the last few years, numerous trends in the digital environment have emerged within businesses including automation, cyber security and project management which has confirmed the prediction that digital skills are an integral employee skillset within any company. Lis Miller expands on this thinking by reconstructing what it means to be digitally literate.
“It’s the digital skills around understanding how your business works, digitising that information and then getting the visibility of what’s going on in the business that wasn’t available before because of the enormous amount of information that needs to be collected. [Digital skills are about] combining the knowledge of the business and feeding back information that you can then use to make better decisions and innovate further.”
At the current pace that technology and software is evolving, Scott Bingley can summarise the top level skills employers need to succeed as being data literacy, instilling a culture of learning and by doing so, empowering employees to adapt these new systems into their daily operations. A company who can pave the way for employee digital upskilling can remove the reliance on outsourced consultants and overseas systems that the pandemic has exposed and increase the retention of knowledge within an organisation.
As the Director of Victoria University’s SAP Next-Gen Lab and Academic Competence Centre (ACC), Bingley understands that these programs fulfil that core objective to up-skill the next generation. The introduction of numerous 12-Week Courses as part of the $63 Million Digital Job Programme for the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions is working as a pathway into further certification for potential employees.
“In 1997, [Victoria University] chose to partner with SAP and has since extended this partnership to have the ACC, plus Australia’s only SAP Next Gen Innovation Lab, where we run industry projects for SAP customers and capstone subjects. This semester, we’re working with SAP on a fire disaster recovery project. So we’re looking at bushfires in Australia, how to prevent the previous fallouts and we’re using the SAP Analytics Cloud to analyse all of this data and inform those decisions.”
Through this partnership, SAP has been able to broaden their reach, increase the diversity of students and mid-career changers within the digital ecosystem and promote SAP as a valid career path. Organisations and businesses alike are also reaping the benefits of the program with the option to embark on a custom training journey that priorities flexibility for both employees and businesses and removes the disruptions that previous upskilling programs cause to workflows.
Lis Miller leaves us with, what it, the definition of “digital skill” that businesses are looking for, “it’s not all technical and computer science, it’s making sure businesses can run digitally, particularly in this post pandemic world.”
To hear more from our discussion around the development of digital skills in the workplace and the opportunities that Victoria University offer, listen to the full episode of The Best Run Podcast here.