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Huge digital skills gap in the UK

Journalist: Arunth Sriganthan, People Management

ended 28. February 2023

A report from Gallup and AWS has been released, revealing a huge digital skills gap in the UK - as only 11% of UK workers possess digital skills, while 72% of businesses surveyed in the UK have a vacancy for workers with digital skills.

I am looking for comment regarding:

- How can organisations increase the digital skills of their workforces?

- What are the benefits of developing digital skills?

- Why is there such a huge digital skills gap in the UK?

- how could digital skills help with H&R?

Link to the findings: https://www.aboutamazon.co.uk/news/aws/digital-skills-drive-gains-for-individuals-organisations-and-the-uk-economy

My deadline is 11am tomorrow.

Many thanks,

Arunth Sriganthan

2 responses from the Newspage community

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Ben Foster
CEO at The SEO Works
There's no doubt that the digital skills gap in the UK is pronounced. Covid rapidly accelerated digital adoption as everyone was forced online, and many businesses woke up to the benefits of digital. Since then, demand for emerging technologies has increased ahead of the skills required to deliver them. Organisations can increase the digital skills of their workforce through training, apprenticeships or hiring an external expert such as an agency to help with their transformation. The benefits of this are higher wages and being able to drive business efficiencies and growth through the adoption of digital. Through our own research, we have uncovered that an Application Developer has the best salary-to-difficulty ratio of any digital job, whilst Digital Marketing is the easiest industry to get into. Source: https://tinyurl.com/2ec5u6ef
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Rafael Guper
COO & Co-founder at UJJI
Digitally skilled teams are more productive, can allocate resources more efficiently, make decisions and solve problems more effectively and improve businesses' bottom lines. However, as per UK Government data, two thirds of the UK working population is employed by startups and SMEs. Expensive subscription plans limited to a high number of employees make learning and development something exclusive to big companies. The secret is to democratise access to digital skills training by piggybacking on the devices and tools we already use every day at work, whilst making plans more flexible, with lower minimum employee requirements and more affordable pricing. By doing so, we can not only bridge the digital skills gap but also improve productivity, engagement and staff retention rates across all companies, regardless of their size.