Do digital businesses lack digital skills?
Why would a digital business need to build its digital skills? Seems like an odd question. But what are the digital skills that every business needs? Go On UK have defined them as: Communicating – emails, social media, customer record management; Searching – understanding Google and friends; Informing – building a clear, accessible, optimised website; and Transacting – ecommerce. These are soft skills, not the deep technical skills you need for animation, gaming, software development. Digital businesses are a sector in themselves – and like cobblers’ children, they are likely to be the least well shod.
Do you speak Geek?
Anyone who watches the Big Bang Theory knows that being an expert in your field doesn’t necessarily mean you can communicate effectively. The more specialist the vocabulary of your field, the less likely you are to be able to explain it to the layman. Do chemical companies expect their research scientists to publish marketing brochures along with patents? Can a construction engineer sell office space in the building they’ve built? So can you really expect a digital sector wizard, who is writing in multiple languages – PHP, C#, JavaScript, Ruby and hundreds more – or marking up the html and css background of the websites you visit every day, to be automatically skilled in the interactions of social media, the optimisation of content, the management of a customer base? Every business needs additional specialist skills to develop and grow, regardless of sector.
So what’s a Digital Skill?
Digital Skills for business, as defined by Go On UK, are simply the day to day skills that we all grew up with, enhanced by the expanding internet. We all have the basic skills – only the tools have changed.
Communicating? We have done it since birth; we learned how to speak, read and write from scratch. Using a keyboard to write emails, or a smartphone to talk to our friends and business contacts remotely by social media, is an extension of that skill.
Searching? In the old days you picked up a book, which could go out of date. The family encyclopaedia (a couple of decades older than me) still talked about land bridges between the fixed continents, rather than tectonic plate movement, to explain fossil records. It didn’t appear to update automatically. Now if you pick up a tablet, you have access to the most up to date information, and a wealth of it too.
Informing? This is marketing, publicity, PR, but using new channels. There is no mystery to a website – it’s just a brochure, or a shop, which has been brought onto the world wide web. The same strategies and decisions apply to informing your customers as they did when we all relied on printed brochures and word of mouth. If word of mouth works for your type of business, then social media is where the conversation happens. If you would have published a brochure, get the same information online. If you have a shop and can ship the goods, use the online high street.
The key word is ‘skills’!
The background to what a business needs has not changed in a century. To make the most of the online space, a business needs those communication skills, proper strategies, growth plans and more. The only difference now is that there are more ways to communicate, more strategic options, more opportunities to grow. The SKILLS are unchanged – the MEDIUM is digital – and every sector, including digital, needs to learn those skills.
For more information on developing your Digital Skills, or helping others to do so, visit the digitalskills.com website.