We have just had an election during which digital technology was barely mentioned. Almost all debate was anchored in last-century analogue thinking. So it is no surprise that the Digital Skills Committee has recently released a report saying the UK is at a tipping point and urgently needs to improve the woeful levels of digital skills employed among the workforce. As it reports, 35% of UK jobs are at risk of being automated over the next 20 years and we need to create new, digitally enabled, work to replace the 10m-plus jobs that this represents.
You have probably heard it said that we all need to be able to code, and that you can learn to build an app in a day. Well sorry, but this is nonsense and misses the point about the skills that are needed now in the workforce. It is a good thing that coding will be part of the national curriculum but apart from the time it is going to take to teach the teachers, it is going to be at least a decade before these students leave school.
So, between now and then, what are we going to do? Should we all be enrolling in coding classes?
The answer is no. You no more need to learn to code than you need to be able to build the engine in your car. But you need to be able to drive and you need to understand the vocabulary of, and speak, digital.
There are few areas of your business that will not benefit from, or be changed by, digital technologies. Whether you are dealing with internal staff, suppliers, partners or customers, you need to be thinking about the digital skills and tools that can make your operations not just 10% better, but degrees of magnitude better. So you need to think how technology could enable an entirely new, transformational business model (think Uber vs taxis, or Hilton vs Airbnb); how you could improve the user experience and user design of every touchpoint with every stakeholder; how you could apply predictive analytics to the big data you are now able to capture; and how machine learning might enable dramatically more efficient processes.
Everyone in your company needs to be able to engage fully with digital technologies. All should learn a dozen key HTML tags, how to use Google Docs, become adept at search, understand the value of social media, and new channels to market. And, with online marketing being so important, how to write quality copy, find and manipulate images, run a podcast, shoot a video and analyse website traffic. And so on. We are front-running the robots. Speaking digital is the key to staying ahead.
Antony Slumbers is founder and chief executive of software developer Estates Today. Follow him on Twitter for more on tech advances @antonyslumbers
Essential tech reading for property people
Tech will never kill books. The paperless office is at last coming to pass, mainly because of the prevalence of tablets and online data, but with even Mark Zuckerberg running a book club, those wonderful physical objects are here to stay.
And there are some great books to help you speak digital.
For me Nicholas Negroponte’s 1996 book Being Digital was a clarion call, and last year’s Zero to One by Paypal founder Peter Thiel is great on what it means to think big in a digital world.
Predictive Analytics by Eric Siegal, with its foreword by Thomas Davenport, is very
good at explaining why this is a fast-growing technology, with great potential in property, as is The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver.
Hooked by Nir Eyal explains how to make products that are addictive and The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz is a cracking tale of managing a digital company. Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder will help you appraise whether your business is well positioned in the marketplace and Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail and others will give you endless ideas about how that position may change.
Smart Cities by Anthony Townsend and Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser are both good on this huge and important topic.
And if you only read one book in this list make it The Second Machine Age by MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. If that doesn’t get you fired up about becoming digital, nothing will.
