Bridging Digital Skills Gap: The Critical Role Of Executive Education

The digital skill gaps can be addressed through in-house executive programmes or through a combination of in-house talent development initiatives.

One of the key organisational priorities should be to nurture a culture of lifelong learning through formally structured executive education programmes as well as self-direct training

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By Dr Antarpreet Singh

The advent of Industry 4.0 in the 1990s saw massive digital disruptions that triggered the emergence of brand-new digital technology skills. These developments led to the creation of new job roles aligned to new-generation digitally driven business models that were centred around leveraging digital innovations and the emergence of smart technologies. 

This resulted in a massive need for investments in digital skills training.  It all started with foundational digital literacy skills and there was a rapid progression in digital skill sets, with the rise of new-generation digital technologies, digital platforms and web applications. As a result, the Internet emerged as a powerful medium with rapid developments related to cloud hosting, computing, and storage. 

A few decades later, COVID-19 emerged as a new game changer. It induced a massive wave of digital transformation that displaced conventional digital skills with the ones centred around artificial intelligence. In this context, we can say that the COVID-19 digital transformation caused a significant ‘digital skills gap’ in the industry, with discriminative and generative AI, growing their footprint, in a quick time.

Future Skills

Today, the narrative about jobs and executive education has acquired a new meaning. It is no longer related to the quantum of jobs in the industry - the focus has shifted from jobs per se to ‘future skills’ within a given job. World Economic Forum characterises future skills as global competencies that have three pillars - Digital and AI skills, Learning & Innovation and Leadership & Life skills. The complex, fluid, and turbulent business environment of today requires thorough readiness of organisations as far as global competencies are concerned. 

The ‘Digital & AI skills’ readiness thus has become an issue of strategic relevance for business leaders. As a result, the executive education programmes of today have a sizeable share of programmes and certifications related to these skills. As AI algorithms continue to acquire human-like intelligence and creativity, the nature of digital skills keeps changing continuously. 

Today, skills built around ‘Human-AI collaboration’ are in great demand and as a result the new-age executive education portfolios in organisations, are beginning to address this skills gap. The World Economic Forum’s report “Putting Skills First” (2023) highlights that by the end of the current decade, the industry is going to experience (progressively) a phenomenon that would have 80 to 85% of job roles becoming redundant or out-of-sync with business needs and the emergence of new job roles built around the paradigm of AI-driven businesses. The new job roles that would be progressively crafted would keep employee-AI dynamics at the centre stage. The executive education programmes thus must address this key need for the future readiness of an organisation. 

New Age Digital Skills

The prominent new age digital skills include deep working knowledge of artificial neural networks that include working closely with deep learning, machine learning algorithms as well as generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) and large language models. 

In addition, modern digital skills include deep knowledge and functional skills related to blockchain programming, Internet of Things, robotic process automation, cyber security cloud architecture etc. The executive education programmes must also promote low or no-code, analytics platforms that have made learning business analytics easier for a functional user who need not get into the domain of data science. 

The digital skill gaps can be addressed through in-house executive programmes or through a combination of in-house talent development initiatives and collaboration with specialised digital skills training partners. A report from Gartner (2023) cites executive skilling as one of the top priorities of an organisation and a key to mitigating business risks due to the fast-changing business environment.   

It is important to understand that executive education programmes do not necessarily mean a ‘trainer-student’ setting in a physical or a virtual classroom. ‘Self-Directed Training: SDT’ is equally important in the context of executive education. SDT must become a key pillar of the learning portfolio of an industry executive. 

Business and HR leaders must promote agile learning & capability development ecosystems. One of the key organisational priorities should be to nurture a culture of lifelong learning through formally structured executive education programmes as well as self-direct training. With industry 5.0 developing at a ‘Breakneck’ speed, the need for digital skills education in an organisation keeps growing. 

The new age executive education programmes must facilitate business leaders to future-proof their organisations by continuously addressing the ever-increasing digital skills gap.

(The author is Director (Academics), WILL Education)

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