Digital Solutions for Companies and Professionals of the Future

Digital transformation is a topic of lively discussion among executive teams around the world and at Zigurat we decided to give them a helping hand by carrying out a study on the most powerful digital solutions and how they will impact the future job market.The study “Future of Jobs in the Digital Era" involved respondents from 307 companies in Spain, Canada, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Great Britain and Colombia. Among them, a half (53,6%) was working in a large company of more than 250 employees. According to the results of the study, more than 85% of the companies are implementing digital transformation processes and 96,3% believe that the implementation of digital tools and processes will improve the results of their company in the short and medium term.We can observe how digital transformation has become a new ally for companies in their quest to keep costs low and customer service high and fight off rivals new and old. The question is, which digital solutions have they turned to. As we can observe in the image below, Big Data analytics (69,6%) is by far the most widely adopted digital solution among the companies who took part in the study, followed by Cloud computing (56,5) and CRM software (52,2%). Chatbots and ERP came in sharing fourth and fifth place with 39,1% of the respondents applying them.On the other hand, when asked about the solution with the greatest potential to enhance the productivity and effectiveness of the company, Artificial Intelligence joined Big Data as the leading technology. Almost half of the respondents (48%) believed these two technologies would make a significant difference in the productivity and effectiveness of the company.We also asked the participants about the digital solutions set to have the greatest impact on the current customer market, and, interestingly, once again Big Data (81,5%) and Artificial Intelligence (77,8%) stood out as the most influential technologies.Which of these solutions do you think would enhance the productivity and effectiveness of your company?What digital solutions do you think will have the greatest impact on the current customer market?As a conclusion on this part of the survey, we can observe how Big Data is the most widely adopted technology as well as the one that the respondents believe is yet to make the biggest difference in many aspects of the business reality. Artificial Intelligence, on the other hand, isn’t so widely adopted yet but believed to have comparable transformative potential when it comes to productivity and effectiveness of the company, and the current customer market.As companies are pursuing large-scale change efforts to capture the benefits of the new solutions or simply to keep up with competitors, the employees should also keep an eye on digital trends in order to guarantee their employability. We asked the respondents to evaluate to what extent their profile will be affected by digitalization. Half of them believed that up to 25% of their tasks could be automated while the other half believed it could be up to 75%. However, nobody believed that technologies will force him to change his job.As digitalization is reshaping professional profiles, the respondents had to list the actions they themselves could take to guarantee their employability. As we can observe in the image below, Management training was considered helpful by half of the participants, followed by adopting a more proactive approach by creating one’s own business (43,2%) and participating in start-ups (30,8%). Technical training was also considered an important factor by one-third of the respondents. The need for management training that also delves into the technical and digital competencies was also the reason why Zigurat launched its Global MBA in Digital Business. Its fifth edition will begin in September 2019.How do you think your professional profile will be affected by digitalization in the future?What actions do you think you could take to guarantee your employability?The second part of the survey shows the impact of new digital technologies on professional profiles and affirms that while companies and their executive teams are trying to tame the digital transformation, the employees should do the same in order to guarantee their employability. And the best way to achieve that is through training that prepares and validates you as a professional of the future.

So if you’re interested in getting deeper into Digital Technologies and new careers in Digital Transformation, take a step further!