New Technology Lacks Value Without Investment in Training and Education

To keep pace with the needs of employers, education should take place consistently and regularly throughout a person’s career, especially when it comes to justifying and maximizing investments in technology.

What does it take to successfully digitize a company? It comes down to talent. Any business can invest in advanced technologies , but creating a workforce that’s ready to use them is much harder. It requires workers who can understand data, serve customers across virtual and physical interaction points and keep up with fast-changing software languages.

A global survey of 4,300 managers and executives shows that 90 percent of workers feel they need to update their skills annually. To close the gap, some companies and governments are starting to take matters into their own hands. My employer, General Assembly, works with more than 500 global organizations — including Adobe, L’Oréal and BNP Paribas — and a variety of international governments that are pursuing fresh approaches to education.

Here are three examples of strategies that are working to create a more educated workforce:

Upskilling: Upskilling means teaching employees how to use new tools and practices. With large organizations forecast to spend as much as $3.8 trillion on information technology in 2019 alone, upskilling employees is critical. According to a recent report from Deloitte, “technology implementations fail rarely because the technology did not work but rather because people are not willing, or find it too difficult, to use them.” Some companies hear this loud and clear, and have already begun investing accordingly. Upskilling can also help ensure that employees’ expertise is being put to the best use as new tools and technologies come to the forefront.

Reskilling: Reskilling is a form of education focused on helping employees make career transformations. Those who invest in reskilling learn new tools and practices in an effort to gain abilities that will allow them to change their jobs entirely. For fields in which the supply of talent doesn’t meet the demand, reskilling is an attractive option. If deployed well, this strategy can be a way to save significant costs, when compared with the price of severance, recruiting and onboarding new employees.

Government investments: While the corporate world has an important role to play in building the workforce of the future, it can’t succeed alone. We need a multifaceted infrastructure for lifelong learning and education, where employees, employers, government and education providers all have a role to play. Some governments are already stepping up to take the lead. In Singapore, all citizens over the age of 25 receive a $360 “Skills Future Credit ” that they can invest in education. France encourages investments in worker training by providing entrepreneurs with a tax credit equal to the number of training hours multiplied by the minimum wage. And in the U.K. the apprenticeship levy requires employers to set aside funds for hiring apprentices.

These investments go far beyond standard learning and development spending . Collectively, they represent a shift in the world of business. Companies and countries are realizing that education is an effective tool to correct what is essentially a labor market inefficiency . To keep pace with the needs of employers, education cannot be something that only happens before you begin work. It has to take place consistently and regularly throughout a person’s career.

Copyright 2019 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.