Adapting to the digital skills shortage: challenges and strategies for onboarding new entrants into digital roles
Pete Cohen, development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and development partners Sally McNamara, Inder Singh, Kate Spencer, Courtney Guilliatt, Daniel Bluzer-Fry, Helen Babb-Delia and Soolin Barclay.
This story outlines an initiative that looks at how to onboard new entrants to digital roles. It highlights the challenges and opportunities and provides an overview of our approach to generating insights and how we can develop a suite of resources designed to facilitate crucial dialogue within organisations and across industries.
Exploring the digital skills shortage and the challenges of transitioning into the workforce
Supply and demand is a familiar premise. Sometimes there isn’t enough supply to go around, and we feel the pinch. At other times forecasts warn us that a mismatch is looming.
When it comes to digital skills, both of these scenarios are true. There is currently a digital skills shortage, and despite recent headlines of layoffs at big tech companies, the shortage is forecast to intensify.
Digital and data have become so ubiquitous in our lives and how business is done that they are almost taken for granted. The vast majority of businesses have no option but to prioritise the integration of digital capabilities into their workforce in order to be able to compete.
Adding these digital capabilities to organisations across the economy under conditions of limited supply isn’t easy. It’s a complex challenge, and tackling any one aspect in isolation is not going to solve it. Several interrelated things need to be considered, including the education system, immigration policies, workforce trends and diversity in the workforce.
However, despite all of these upstream challenges, one thing is constant: at some point, organisations need to onboard people into these new roles.
Transitioning from education into work is an age-old reality that is addressed in some industries with apprenticeships and in others with a graduate pathway. However, against an evolving landscape, so too do the approaches to onboarding new entrants need to adapt.
Adapting to the evolving business environment: exploring the necessity of cross-functional teams and the importance of communication and collaboration
The range of skills required to apply digital technologies in a commercial setting successfully is vast and is becoming increasingly complex. The pace of change is accelerating, both in terms of the underlying technologies themselves and the business environment where value creation is being sought.
A common response now being adopted in many organisations is agile ways of working. This involves forming cross-functional teams — blending technically-oriented developers working directly alongside designers and product managers. This is different from more traditional approaches where teams work in functional silos and then pass the work along in a sequential fashion, gathering all of the requirements first, then doing design, then building, and then testing.
This approach enables teams to work in small chunks and iterative loops, making them far more responsive to feedback and change — which is essential in today’s business environment.
However, it also introduces additional skill requirements, especially related to communication and collaboration — things not easily taught in a classroom setting and that are better taught and learned on the job.
Raw technical skills are almost taken for granted. This isn’t to diminish them, as they are hard-won and must be constantly refined and expanded upon as the technical landscape evolves at a dizzying pace. However, technical skills are not enough to make someone a valuable contributor to a high-performing team in a digital context. They need complementary soft skills and support in developing them.
Graduate programs vs bootcamps: comparing the different pathways for onboarding new entrants
Graduate programs reflect the existing system of education and employment. People typically study the appropriate degree, are found by organisations via career fairs and intake programs, and are onboarded by doing rotations through multiple entry-level roles.
These programs continue to serve an important role.
However, what has changed is that not all new entrants are university graduates with a computer science or related degree. Rather what is emerging as a common pathway is for people to do a six-month bootcamp to learn the fundamentals and then seek to learn on the job. This particularly suits people who are reskilling and changing careers throughout their life who don’t wish to invest in a multi-year degree — both from a financial and a time perspective. Employers are showing themselves to be supportive of people coming in via these pathways — especially for women entering technology roles, as there is a need to boost diversity, which can’t be achieved by relying only on people coming through the university pathway.
The implication of these different pathways is that new entrant onboarding programs need to acknowledge and cater for people with different types of prior education and experience.
A university graduate with four years of computer science studies but no prior work experience is going to have a very different profile to someone who has a decade of work experience but has only studied coding in a six-month bootcamp. Each have their respective strengths and weaknesses, but the reality is that a one size fits all program will not cater for both of them.
The problem: highlighting the disparity in the maturity of onboarding programs across organisations
There is a range of maturity levels in how organisations are approaching the sourcing and onboarding of new entrants into digital roles.
Some organisations have well-established and highly coordinated programs, while others tend to take a more ad hoc approach — either due to not having the bandwidth to apply dedicated resources or lacking the knowledge as to what helps new entrants on their journey.
These factors have an impact on multiple fronts — the experience of the new entrant, the strain placed on the people seeking to onboard them, and ultimately the quality of the outcome.
Weaving a response: promoting dialogue and awareness to improve the onboarding experience
There is no silver bullet that is going to solve this challenge for all organisations. But increasing awareness and promoting dialogue will help. This dialogue is important both within organisations and also between organisations.
Part of the reason for this is that onboarding of new entrants to an organisation is, for the most part, based on human interactions. This makes it a complex rather than a complicated problem. The appropriate response to a complex challenge is not to develop a rule book based on best practices but rather to encourage constant dialogue and experimentation.
We’ve taken a twofold approach that takes into account both organisational and industry views. Within organisations, we want to support these conversations with tools and frameworks that provide a shared vocabulary, with the ultimate goal of inspiring and empowering people within these organisations to develop the approach which works best for them in their context. At an industry level, we want to foster a community of practice with representatives from multiple organisations which enables us to support the ongoing surfacing of stories from people of what has been tried and either succeed or failed.
RMIT FORWARD’s role in initiating and fostering conversations to generate insights and drive impact
FORWARD is uniquely placed to both initiate and foster these conversations and to distribute the insights that emerge.
By looking at the changing nature of work and workplaces and being able to apply that across organisations and industries, we seek to identify meaningful patterns and the leverage points where the highest degree of impact can be made by applying innovative interventions. Our ethos is to generate insights that can be meaningfully applied in the field and to see those learnings harnessed and applied at scale.
As we thought about the domain of technology organisations and the target audience who we see participating in the co-creation of these insights within organisations, our hypothesis was that conventional presentation formats — such as a PowerPoint deck or a thick whitepaper — are unlikely to resonate or gain any traction.
So, as part of designing and hosting our industry roundtable conversations, we engaged Rory Green — a digital storyteller and poet — to help us purposefully experiment with unorthodox techniques for eliciting and capturing insights.
For example, in one session, we had participants capture their experiences and stories in the form of zines — hand-folded paper booklets that each person illustrated and annotated.
We are also experimenting with the creation of physical cards containing illustrations and vignettes of a challenge, insight or story, which can be used in a workshop to provide participants with prompts to think about and capture their own insights and stories.
Another concept we are trialling is to support organisations in the creation of their own physical wisdom box — a repository of their peoples’ stories in their own words, which can be expanded over time, and which serve the purpose of promoting collective dialogue, problem-solving and experimentation in respect to how they onboard new entrants to their organisation.
Conclusion: highlighting the need for collective efforts to improve onboarding experiences for a healthier ecosystem
A concern we heard when approaching organisations to be involved in sharing their insights was related to commercial sensitivities associated with their onboarding programs.
The war for talent is fierce, and some organisations invest significant time and resources in the design and running of their onboarding programs. To share their learnings with potential competitors is confronting.
While we understand and respect those concerns, we believe that a rising tide will raise all boats. Our reasoning is that no one person stays in any organisation indefinitely — whether that’s because of changes in life circumstances or a search for new experiences. This means that a new entrant who is onboard in one organisation will eventually join another — one ideally that is better equipped to add value in their next role when they do.
Assuming a healthy ecosystem where people are able to progress in their responsibilities and explore roles across a variety of organisations (or even different industries) over the course of their careers, then collective efforts to improve the onboarding experience will be universally beneficial.
Part of our vision for this initiative is to adapt and extend it beyond the technology sector and make it applicable to any sector that is onboarding people into roles that require a mix of technical and soft skills and outside of traditional pathways.
We welcome the opportunity to hear perspectives from anyone on this topic — including people who are on the journey as a new entrant themselves, as a supporting team member and from people who are designing and running new entrant programs. There is also a range of resources and services in development, such as facilitation guides which we are happy to share.
Please reach out to Pete Cohen to discuss if you are interested pete.cohen@rmit.edu.au
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
Contact us at forward@rmit.edu.au
