9 hours Ago By Niall Kitson
22 November 2024 You’d be hard pressed to find someone who would argue that skills is not an issue the IT industry has found itself grappling with for years. Some are worse than others but there’s generally a shortage of some kind all the time. It’s not just a lack of specialist skills, although that’s more or less an ever-present, it’s also a paucity of general IT knowledge.
It doesn’t help that the scale for measuring general IT knowledge is moving all the time. As the scope of technology widens and the devices we use for accessing its services widen, there’s a general dissipation of that general knowledge. Somebody brought up using a laptop as their primary IT device, for instance, will have a level of knowledge built up over time on what to do if things go wrong beyond turning it on and off again.
Similarly, another person who uses their phone for virtually everything will have some awareness of how to use it best for a particular purpose or to access a specific service. So, to some extent, we all have an internal level of IT skills. They’re generally the ones we need to get by, bolstered by the occasional visit to a YouTube video that promises to help fix a certain issue.
When it comes to work, most of us are employed to perform a certain function or task and that’s our primary purpose. In many cases, IT is a daily part of how we perform that function but it’s not the actual function itself. It helps to facilitate what we do.
Occasionally, it might frustrate what we’re trying to do or how we are accustomed to fulfilling that function, but for the most part, it works well. There’s a balance to be struck between how much IT we need to perform our normal jobs in terms of how much it facilitates our work and how much we facilitate IT to do our jobs. And there’s the issue of how much of what we do has to be geared to be used by technology to get the most value out of it by using IT.
Anyhow, it’s fair to say that there’s probably a grey area between what we can expect ourselves to do and what we expect IT people to do that could be more clearly defined. That space is fertile ground for improvement and it’s something Technology Ireland Digital Skillnet, in collaboration with Microsoft, is seeking to address through the Data Smart programme which is aimed at giving professionals who do not work in IT-based roles with the confidence and essential data skills – or data literacy – to “thrive in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape”. It’s a 12-week programme that includes a combination of online tutorials and live workshops facilitated by Microsoft.
The course is designed to provide participants “with the foundational skills in data collection, cleaning, transformation, visualisation, and storytelling, while exploring cutting-edge topics like AI, data governance, and emerging technologies”. Maire Hunt, network director of Technology Ireland Digital Skillnet, describes it as “the most ambitious national upskilling opportunity for companies to adopt essential data skills that has been created to date. Our ambition is to train over 10,000 professionals from all backgrounds and across all sectors, over the next three years”.
Pretty good, right? And it ticks a lot of boxes. Something you can do in your own time, that’s flexible, online and, it says here, “low cost”. I’m definitely all in favour of these types of mass skills programmes.
Anything that can help broaden people’s skills to the level they need is to be applauded. My only minor quibble is whether people should have to pay for this at all. Look at all the benefits it brings to employees and employers and, by extension, Ireland.
If it’s a win-win for everybody, shouldn’t we be making it freely available as a matter of course? Still, anything that helps people to better understand the interaction between their jobs and IT through an awareness of how to use data should be a no-brainer. Let’s hope everyone else thinks so too. Read More: Billy MacInnes Blog Blogs Education skills.
