Here’s a statement to conjure with: technology is no longer vertical, it’s all-pervasive.
There are probably businesses in the world today that don’t use IT in some way but we can’t think of any. We live in a world that is digital, mobile, and instant – most of us can hardly function any other way.
The one thing we all know about technology is that it advances all the time. Where you may have been technologically competent yesterday, you can bet that today something has changed and unless you’re frequently upskilling, you’re out of date. We all need to be able to keep up in this ever-changing environment.
At Mindworx Academy we started off focusing on the readiness of graduates to enter the workplace for the first time, not just in tech skills but in basic workplace behaviour. Many of them come from backgrounds that offer no frames of reference for the office environment. While the need for this type of training continues to grow, we’re now increasingly providing training in tech and specialist skills that are becoming crucial for the 21st-century workplace.
According to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2016 ‘Future of Jobs’ survey, fully 65% of future workforce strategies should concentrate on investing in reskilling current employees, implementing two key strategies:
- Reskill existing employees in coding, automation, and analytics.
- Repurpose existing skills for greater client focus, exception handling, and improved cognition.
This fits in with the WEFs research finding that the top three skills that will be in demand by 2020 are sociability, complex problem solving, and processing. Dovetailing with this research is McKinsey’s finding that demand for people with 21st-century skills will outstrip supply. We already know this to be true, which is why we have positioned ourselves to help South African business and government agencies build an army of technical talent with contemporary courses in coding, automation, and analytics, and in the rapidly growing field of robotics process automation (RPA).
We know that attracting and retaining the best talent includes offering them a chance to work with the latest technologies, languages, and frameworks. You’ll find our graduates in a wide variety of industries, such as financial forensics, predictive analytics, industrial engineering, insurance and banking.
Here’s the thing about the Mindworx Academy: we know training, we know tech, and we know non-traditional. We’ve pioneered innovative training and development techniques that equip trainees with a deep and abiding understanding of what they learn on our courses, creating a platform for continued learning.
But there are other elements to our training that are every bit as important as skills. Training has to focus on the whole person. We make it exciting and always aim for people to leave our Academy not only cleverer but also proud of themselves and more fulfilled and satisfied.
Pervasive technology is moving us into a very different world – the trick is to ensure that we enable real people to inhabit it and that we equip them to work alongside the brave new world of robotics and artificial intelligence.