As The Economist recently noted, one of the most prominent consequences of the current
Covid-19 pandemic will be “the infusion of data-enabled services into ever more aspects of life.”
We except digital conversion to be an even bigger imperative for organizations in the short-term
future. Contrary to popular belief, digital transformation is a smaller amount about technology and
more about people. You can pretty much buy any technology, but your ability to adapt to an ever
more digital fate depends on developing the next generation of skills, closing the gap
between skill supply and demand, furthermore future-proofing your personal and others’
potential.

As it turns out, most of us end up in jobs and careers for serendipitous reasons, and stay in them
for a long time, rarely ceasing to rethink our potential: Am I in the right job? Is my career the best
fit for my interests and abilities? Would I enjoy my life more if I had chosen something else?
Furthermore, while every job requires learning, we are prewired for familiarity, routine, and ease,
which is why most folks find yourself learning less on the work, the more time we actually spend
on the job. This is good within the short run because we will do our jobs on autopilot, freeing up
mental resources; yet it’s counterproductive within the end of the day because
what we gain in practice, we drop in new learning possibilities.

An even bigger loss is that we may undergo our entire working lives without discovering,
including unlocking, our true potential. To be sure, it's time for many people to understand this,
yet within the long-term, a big number of individuals will likely find yourself in better careers and
look back on their less meaningful and fewer engaging past careers like someone who looks
back without regret on the top of a less fulfilling personal relation, even one where it wasn’t their
choice to exit. Put people first: Technology is usually about doing more with less, yet that
combination is effective as long as you pair technology with the proper human skills. Just as
technological disruption has generally led to automation and therefore the elimination of outdated
jobs, it's also always created new jobs. This is why innovation is usually described as creative
destruction. But the creative aspect of innovation is entirely hooked into people. If we will
leverage human adaptability to reskill and upskill our workforce, then we will simultaneously
augment humans and technology. It’s really quite simple: the foremost brilliant innovation is
irrelevant if we aren't skilled enough to use it, and even the foremost impressive human minds
will be subsided useful if they don’t team up with tech. The main implication is that when leaders
believe investing in technology, they ought to first believe investing within the people that can
make that technology useful. Focus on soft skills: even as digital transformation is more about
people instead of technology, the key technical skills are soft skills instead of hard skills.
Sure, the recruitment business is excited for cybersecurity analysts, software engineers, and
data scientists.

“Does education Still Prepare People for Jobs?” ,
There’s a good bigger need for people that are often trained within the next wave of IT skills.
Paradoxically, education is usually playing catch up, because where universities perceive
employer demand, they follow up with relevant courses and learning programs, creating a future
surplus of talent supply in those areas. In our view, the simplest thanks to make your
organization more data-centric and digital is to selectively invest in those that are most
adaptable, curious, and versatile within the first place. Since nobody knows what the key future
hard skills are going to be, the simplest action is to back the people that are presumably to
develop them. Our own talent development philosophy is to combine this dual focus on the
potential for soft skills, and knowledge for hard skills: we select people with high learnability

(people with a craving mind) and match their interests to in-demand skills while understanding
that those hard skills may soon become outdated — therefore the key's that their curiosity
survives intact.
If you can’t fail fast, make sure you succeed slowly: The statements that speed is king, that
action is key, that perfect is the enemy of the good, and that you should be willing and wanting to
fail fast, have all become clichés in management thinking. But, the sole thanks to adapt to a
constantly changing and rapidly disrupted present is to hurry up and operate at pace. Of course,
there's always a trade-off between speed and quality, so if you can't fail fast enough — meaning
you don’t have a culture in the system that tolerates quick experiments with the view that the
teachings learned from those failed experiences will cause you to stronger and smarter, then you
would like to make certain that your long-term bets are working out.
At the end of the day, failure is only a strategy for getting to success in the long run, so if you pick
another strategy, that’s fine — just make sure you can actually get there. However, remember
that few things breed stagnation and a false sense of security like an obsession successfully.
Indeed, we often hear leaders rationalize their failures with a self-congratulatory “we have
learned from our mistakes,” yet it’s much harder to learn from your achievements. As the last
several weeks have demonstrated, we are agile as a worldwide community. This agility has been
people-led and technology-supported. Human beings are the common denominator to the
concept of future-proofing, whether it’s as a complement to the technology being unleashed for
remote working, or whether it’s because we hold the soft skills and leadership needed to drive a
historic crisis, or because we have the insights needed to drive slow success or fast failure
for a cure. It all starts with each and every one of us, and those we are responsible for
developing. The key is to nurture curiosity, so we have options, even outside of a crisis.

Source and reference original document by Havard Business Review .
Know more: www.hbr.org