Digital Competences: Best Skills To Grow Professionally
Digital skills are essential skills for almost any professional in 2023. Today, finding an industry, sector, or business niche supported by the Internet and digital tools is difficult. This makes having a good user level with many of these technologies necessary.
The health of your professional project could depend on your digital skills and your team’s. But do we fully understand what digital skills are? Why should we invest in them? Do we know how to identify the most important ones? What are the professionals who can help me? Where do I look?
What Are Digital Competences?
Digital competencies are the skills, knowledge, experiences, and capacities that allow us to find, manage, evaluate, communicate, and take advantage of information productively and safely through digital media and tools.
This technological concept encompasses a wide set of tools and knowledge that allow us to use modern technology to process, consume, and transmit data and information.
In more practical terms, digital skills would be the skills that allow us to make effective use of computers, mobile devices (of different types, not just mobile phones), connectivity hardware, specialized equipment, and all the software involved.
At the same time, without developed digital skills, we can find ourselves in the difficult situation of not being able to use the technologies at our disposal properly. In many cases, these technologies become mandatory (think of different essential bureaucratic procedures that today are exclusively telematic).
Why Are Digital Skills Important?
We can broadly explain the importance of investing in our digital skills and those of our team with four real examples.
Digital Productivity
In any professional project, there is a long list of administrative processes that we cannot fail to comply with. Some of these processes, such as controlling the company’s inventory or registering the sales team’s expenses, can take an absurd amount of time if we try to do them manually in the traditional way.
The development and implementation of technology have facilitated the processing of data in a way that is difficult to understand. Processes that used to take hours can now be completed in seconds. Productivity in the company skyrocketed, and it has all been thanks to digital tools.
Fluidity In The Modern Economy
We mentioned before the example of bureaucratic procedures that are now exclusively telematic. The same applies to many banking procedures, orders to suppliers, and contracting essential services, among others.
We can access all these procedures and formalities with the necessary digital skills. Such a situation can be very problematic for any company.
And it is that in the modern economy, with the current penetration of technology, we cannot work fluently if we do not implement the appropriate digital tools ourselves. The absence of them can be the cause of many problems that will be directly reflected in the productivity of our company.
Cybersecurity
Every year we discover bigger and riskier cybersecurity scandals and crises in the news. Millions of digital records with sensitive information (our sensitive information) are stored on data servers in thousands of locations worldwide. Protecting this data requires billions of euros a year in investment by large technology companies.
But the reality is that the greatest economic loss is not produced when these large companies are affected but when ordinary users and small companies are negligent with cybersecurity.
The best part is that improving the cybersecurity of our project can be a manageable investment or becoming experts on the subject. When we delve a little into digital skills related to data protection, we discover that most problems are caused by carelessness and ignorance of the most basic things.
What to do when we receive a suspicious email message? What kind of password should we use for our online accounts? What kind of information should we store in the cloud, and what should we not? These are all basic questions that every modern professional should be able to answer.
Discovery Of New Opportunities
The amount of high-value information available on the Internet is valuable. All this information represents opportunity after opportunity: for our development as professionals, our team’s technical improvement, and our companies’ growth.
But we must know how to look for this information. The resources are there waiting for us to take advantage of them. That requires some fundamental foundations regarding our digital skills.
Also Read: Big Data & Small Data: What Are They & How Are They Different?
How To Improve Digital Competences?
Improving digital skills is within everyone’s reach. It is a continuous learning process that is always available. Of course, it requires patience on our part and our teams.
Here are some recommendations for improving digital skills to benefit your professional project.
Investigate And Practice
If you’re reading this article, chances are you’re knowledgeable enough to use Google and research almost anything online. Reading this article is the first step to improving your digital skills. From here, expand your search with curiosity.
Research what digital tools are popularly used in your sector, the most common functions, the costs, and how to implement them. All this information will give you the confidence to start implementing tools and learn how to use them.
Whatever technology your project is already using, explore with curiosity. Please familiarize yourself with how it seeks to solve problems, its interface, and its most basic functions. This exploration process must be done with patience, gradually gaining confidence in the tool.
Talk To Your Team
You must know the strengths and weaknesses of your team in terms of digital skills. Your role is likely to be executive or managerial, which will put more weight on the capabilities of your team members.
Ask how they feel about their digital skills, where they think they can improve, if they know of any specific technology that could benefit the project, and if they know of any educational resources to improve the use of tools.
Modernize Processes
If you are one of those who follow the philosophy of “learning by doing,” perhaps modernizing your processes can be the key to developing your digital skills.
At this time and without the need to look too hard, you surely already know where the productive deficiencies of your project are. What processes can be improved? Which can be automated? Which ones can be removed? These are questions you can answer right now.
With this information, ask and investigate what technologies can help. You will need help with the implementation and introduction to its use, but once this is done, if the complexity and degree of specialization necessary allow it, use the technology as much as possible, paying special attention to how it helps to solve the problem.
A Stronger Project With The Right Skills
Our knowledge and skills will be decisive in our professional success. Regarding digital skills, they represent one more layer in all the work we do to be better professionals.
We cannot know everything, but we must have knowledge and trustworthy people to help us implement the necessary tools according to our activities. For this, in our Club, we have professionals with extensive experience who help us walk this path with a healthy adaptation process for our companies. To change something within our companies, we must be sure who we will count on and learn to trust.
To this day, ignorance of the use of technology can be very expensive. Therefore, a basic level is a requirement if we want to work in any sector of the economy.
If we refer to your business project, this is especially true. It will often be optional for you to have a high level of digital skills, but you must be aware of their importance among the professionals in the project. For this reason, it is committed to constantly improving work teams and the available technological means and optimizing processes with digital tools.
Also Read: Time Management: How To Be More Productive In 2023
