Writer: PROFESSOR OJO EMMANUEL ADEMOLA
The analysis of trending statistics on digital literacy and productivity shows an intriguing pattern. For instance, Capterra’s recent data on this subject, states that 76% of businesses state that a lack of digital skills would impact the profitability of their company.
Eighty-eight percent (88%) of young people believe that digital skills will be crucial for the future of their careers. 70% of the young workforce states that they want an employer who invests in their digital literacy skills.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for the individual Nation’s workforce to have sufficient levels of digital literacy to reap the efficacy of digitalization and embrace the Fourth Industrial Revolution was already irresistible.
It is plausible that as each country either developed or developing emerges from the pandemic, that necessity will have only increased, and geometrically so to point up.
For instance, the sudden changes imposed on the education sector, healthcare sector, and other critical sectors of the economy have exposed shortages in digital literacy.
Digital literacy will play a crucial role in solving the productivity puzzle in construction and provide some exciting inventions and or innovations.
Digital literacy is also crucial in the information and communications sector which has experienced rapid change in how individual’s access and consume news scoping of information content.
Trendily, tertiary institutions also have a crucial role to play in enriching learners’ digital literacy to subsidize them with readily transferable skills, attitudes, and ethics that prepare them for a workplace that is fast being remade by technology especially, AI.
It is important, however, that it is digital literacy in its truest sense that is stimulated by researchers and facilitated students with innovative learning pathways if you prefer.
Too often the focus can be on teaching the technical operations pedagogical when using digital tools, whereas a more immersive, all-encompassing approach, like, Andragogical upskilling by digital literacy should help develop learners’ proficiency to cognitively apply their skills to evaluate, analyze, criticize, synthesize, and produce new information, to be curious in finding difficulties and using digital tools to solve them, elicit ingenious projects and other undertakings with the respective communication styles in innovative and visually captivating routes.
Consequently, we live in a digital world where computer skills allow us to learn new information, stay connected with loved ones, and create opportunities for employment creation and career advancement.
Today’s capacity building centrally takes root from the making and advancing of digital transformation skills to explore the fundamentals of working with operating systems, applications, and productivity tools such as Microsoft Word and Excel, and learn to confidently navigate the online world.
The pathway to elucidating the hardware and software domains that make up a computer to collaborate and connect using online productivity tools is becoming a leaning towards the act of useful approach to escalating the overall objective of job and wealth creations.
It all centres on learning how to use social media, and other usefulness of the internet safely and responsibly.
The currently applicable strand for productivity dictates that the need to work with computers and the associated devices is within and extending inclusively. In other words, digitalization helps around the getting of the essential digital skills needed to succeed in the new world of work. Such includes the basics of working with devices like computers, tablets, and mobile phones, and is associated with the skillfulness of bringing your device to upping and upskilling the productivity pathways to robust economic development.
Working and collaborating online. In today’s centrality of unprecedented working is how best you get to use the internet and collaborate with others online. You become digitally transformed with the appropriation of the skills you need to safely search the web, use video chat and email, and more.
For example, the use of the Microsoft 365 suite can help optimize your productivity in your personal and professional life. Digital tools such as industrialization via online partnership platforms, and project management software can increase efficiency in the workplace.
By relieving manual tasks and streamlining workflows, digital literacy can help workers achieve their goals more quickly, and develop nearly strategy for everything simply, and seamlessly escalation of strategy that works efficiently.
For productivity, much is important essentially the “doing” that results from usage, learning, and the making use of the relevant digital tools. At times, the citizens do not know what they like; they like what they know. For example, many assume that face-to-face pedagogy is the best way to teach and that andragogical nurturing via online facilitation is innately defective.
They seek ways for online initiatives to support the high-grade face-to-face experience. Such a position has become mostly the issue in the post-Covid era.
Now nearly three-quarters of world Universities turn this view on its head, asking what face-to-face support is required to supplement online education.
The transitory term reminds us to look at learning, for example, challenges from many directions as blended as trending globally. Before the most recent pandemic, this made computer-only practicum glance outlandish. It drives us to pick the right tools to get the job done, but the reverse has now become the productivity learning pathway.
Another component of thought remains unconferences. Conferences used to come in one flavour: dull. New advances in the craft of making gatherings that individuals appreciate are frequently coordinated in meagre time and at negligible expense.
Unconferences are recognized severally by no featured subject matter expert or assigned master; advancement considering conceived variety; having a good time managing serious subjects; developing self-association; veritable local area, closeness, and regard.
Nonetheless, the future of work, which is indeed now, is all about building up sufficiently to get better. Such an approach is an evolutionary challenge.
Regardless, the eventual fate of work, which is to be sure now, is tied in with getting better at improving. Such a methodology is a transformative test.
You don’t arrive by approaching slowly and carefully. Rather, you set up a huge number of little investigations, let them tear, and see what you end up with. Meta-learning centres around working on the interaction of realizing, which incorporates how individuals learn, obstructions to learning, and working on the learning of the two people and associations.
Considering the art of productivity as aligned with the benefits that AI, data analytics, enterprise management, and others can afford the current thoughts around the offering of digitalisation practically. Capacity building brings up actively, the spiral thriving of mindful empowerment and productivity.
It could be a nexus of extending the use of applicable digital tools considering the overall journey of how the response time to get the work done keeps passing the reduction apt through the whole time on earth to extending the improvement methodology to scale up productivity geometrically. Such remains what the developing economies of the global South nations need crucially to nurture their economies to global efficacious competitiveness.
Embracing sustenance is your initial step. You’ll and should be adaptable, take a gander at things from alternate points of view, consider what you see, attempt new things, run psychological well-being tests, and focus.
A careful individual frequently removes the thoughtless auto-pilot of random living to heed the master’s guidance to “become what your identity is!” Casual learning is regular. It happens when we treat individuals and associations as living beings in nature. Such remaining part of a reasoning as an expertise.
You get better at it with training and further development. Many individuals mistake thinking for knowledge. That is an error since that speculation leads canny individuals to waste their possible by not figuring out how to think.
In prior decades, most business leaders saw no worth in the Web’s past economic transmissions. CEOs and Data Officials of those years issue timidly proposed not to commend the future of electronic business nor to cheerlead the production of an incredible public organization that, in all likelihood won’t ever emerge.
From that point forward, the Web has instructed us: Time bests flawlessness. In the days of yore, preparing wasn’t delivered until it went through a glove of editors, editors, packagers, twofold checkers, and killjoys.
The technique is tied in with everything that is a work underway. If it’s not done, mark it “draft” or “beta,” however don’t hold it up. Online organizations work with individual connections. The Web empowers one to depend on the thoughtfulness of outsiders.
Many individuals aware before have assisted me with learning. You could without much of a stretch keep your karma account in balance by helping other people learn. The Web even empowers you to chat with your legends assuming you’re trying courageous. To learn something, instruct it. The Web enables every one of us to freely communicate our thoughts. It is both narrow-minded and liberal to Share thoughts. Making sense of something on the web explains your reasoning and builds up your learning.
The world is only as big as you make it out to be. All over the planet in about a few tents of milliseconds. Amazing! With Skype, you can chat with individuals all around the globe through Voice over IP (VoIP) free of charge.
As our world of work continues to exist more in the digital world than in the physical world, the reality is far more engaging within the digital world for productivity to escalate convincingly. For example, more learning is indeed actualising andragogical through ‘Me-learning’, Google, Teacher Amazon, and other social media platforms than physical attendance in a face-to-face pedagogy.
Several credible qualifications and related certifications are available these days online with great delivery aiming solely at aggravating productivity. Qualifications, which usually entail the pathways of instructed us significantly over four years of extensive studies for learners at any top establishments of learning are now accessible for shorter times or durations with digital tools of discernable essentialities.
What’s more and why? For a certain something, workforce productivity analytics is broadly a workforce analytics category exceeding the expectations that analytics traditionally refers to solutions offered to help organizations measure employee data for workforce planning, talent management, performance, and engagement. Workforce productivity analytics focuses more specifically on data related to employee, team, and organizational productivity management, intended to be used by all elements of governance and organisations.
With digital literacy, workforce productivity analytics remain effective in collecting and analysing digital work activity data to help in governance and organizations’ understanding of productivity drivers like time management, technology usage, focus time, collaboration, multi-tasking, and more.
Building up visibility into these productivity drivers, with the ability to view trends, benchmarks, summaries, and team comparisons, can provide beneficial understandings to help organizations in the improvement of business outcomes and help employees and teams work wiser and smarter.
Overall, gaining a consistent view of productivity across governance frameworks, businesses’ teams remain an apt value addition to the ultimate goal of boosting productivity. Without a workforce productivity analytics solution, perceptions of individual or team productivity are vague, founded largely on the inadequacy of individuals involved and not a holistic measure of such productivity pathway. These perceptions are also highly subjective, often based on other factors wholly extraneous to substantial productivity.
Conclusively, with digital literacy, the ability to gather productivity data always becomes value addition, and invariably across governance institutions, organizational teams, and institutions to gain an objective view of productivity, based on virtual data versus subjective management of perception to create viable competitive advantage holistically.
So, governance and businesses can ensure optimising productivity from team members as collective efforts become effectual, thus extending the perpetual benefits of digital literacy in boosting overall productivity across the board of governance and business.
Ademola is a pioneer Professor and Chairperson of Professor Ademola Ojo Emmanuel Foundation.
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