We recently wrote about 6 essential parts of digital transformation and one piece was about skill-set that everyone will need in the near future.
Apart from being technically savvy it is crucial to see potential citizen automators in your company who will create and lead this movement.
If you are unfamiliar with this term, check out our RPA 101 post Who is a Citizen Automator?
Contrary to popular beliefs about robots stealing jobs, economists say that automation will actually create jobs. The challenge, however, may come from the anticipated skills mismatch that business leaders say will rapidly emerge in the next few years to fill new roles relative to automation and artificial intelligence.
Get people ready for a digital transformation
The rise of retraining employees has already started. Take it from Amazon, which just announced one of the largest reskilling initiatives to date. Instead of laying off workers as the e-commerce giant increasingly automates warehouse and delivery functions, it plans to retrain 100,000 people to move into more highly skilled jobs within the company.
By 2025, Amazon plans to have upskilled about a third of its U.S. workforce through its own education initiatives like Amazon Technical Academy and Machine Learning University. While supporting employees through digital transformation is a $700 million investment, the company believes that leveraging its current workforce—especially in a competitive job market—will pay off.
Training your employees is the key to successful digital transformation
Amazon found that the fast-growing, highly skilled jobs that it will increasingly need to fill include data-mapping specialists, data scientists, solutions architects, and business analysts, which will all require differing levels of fluency in automation and AI.
Upskill employees for success
Accenture is another company participating in the upskilling trend. In its annual Tech Vision report, Accenture calls these in-demand employee types the “human+ worker,” meaning workers whose abilities are augmented by their command of technology. They are also often called the “citizen automator”—non-technical business users across all functional areas who not only embrace automation at work but become experts and use it to build new solutions.
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In The Rise of the Citizen Developer by Unisphere Research and Kintone, almost half of citizen developers surveyed reported that training was necessary to support and encourage such professionals, but providing an easy-to-use platform that doesn’t require coding was even more important.
Technology for non-tech professionals
The rise of low-code or no-code platforms is already making this possible. Inc. Magazine named them “the future of software.” It says, “The more power we can put in the hands of the people who use [new software] tools every day, the better off we'll be.”
ElectroNeek is an example of such platforms that are aimed to streamline business processes by fully or partly automating them using Robotic Process Automation bots. Through a simple graphical interface and smart building tools, non-tech users are empowered to automate processes via software bots into production environments.
To learn more about ElectroNeek and the opportunities it brings to companies during this time of uncertainty, reach out to our automation expert.