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Introduction

Business and technology have eternally been kindred bedfellows with one another, sustaining market advancements and giving rise to new products and services across essentially every industry. Following the advent of readily available business computing technology in the early 1980’s with the release of the IBM 5150 desktop computer, a radical new wave of business innovations began to influence almost all aspects of business operations. Problem solving became the path to business improvements, and the sheer amount of information that could be leveraged for decision making changed the corporate appetite for technology regardless of whether a company’s core deliverables to its clients had anything to do with computers.

Along with the rising tide of workplace computing came an escalating need for employees that were adept at harnessing the capabilities of this technology. However, the increasingly rapid pace of technological change creates a set of contemporary problems when it comes to how organizations function—essentially, the methods and processes many businesses have used in the past may be swiftly outdated. This can cost a company relevance to its customers and the ability to remain competitive in its respective market. Further, the shelf life of technology skillsets becomes shorter and shorter as the velocity of technological change picks up. As such, skills training from five years ago may bear only passing applicability to the knowledge and skills needed by employees to use current digital tools—a past investment in technology-related training does not necessarily foster today’s skills.

Relatedly, merely training for skills does not ensure a company’s digital readiness. There needs to be concurrent attention given to the structure of work tasks and how technology may necessitate a redesign of these tasks. There are several implications to consider in this respect, as how to accomplish a task using a piece of technology (i.e., skills training) is necessary but not sufficient to competently discern when it is needed, what range of tasks it can potentially be adapted to, and where the piece of technology can be accessed (i.e., opportunities to apply newly learned skills). In other words, a company endeavoring to upskill their workforce needs to tend to the context in which tasks occur, and help employees grasp the situational factors and intra-organizational communications that lead to success. Accordingly, how are companies addressing these obstacles when it comes to preparing their employees for successful business operations in the future?

To explore these issues, Training Industry, Inc. and CrossKnowledge conducted a study to examine how organizations across industries are utilizing training to successfully navigate the hurdles associated with digital readiness. In August-October 2015, 168 companies with greater than 1000 employees completed a confidential survey reporting their organizations’ use of technology-related training for employees, in addition to current trends and challenges associated with seeking to foster digital readiness in the modern workplace.

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1 US BLS (2005). Computer and Internet Use at Work (Current Population Survey). Available online at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ciuaw.toc.htm 2 US BLS (2013). Computer and Internet Access in the United States (Current Population Survey). Available online at http://www.census.gov/hhes/computer/publications/ 3 US BLS (2015). Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey. Available online at http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001

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