A digital solution to digital disruption

By Michael Fenlon, PwC Chief People Officer and Carrie Duarte, PwC US Workforce of the Future Leader

We now live and work in a world where sitting still is actually moving backwards. This is not only true for business but for our society. Confronting today’s digital transformation is daunting. Business leaders fret over how to maintain their competitive advantage. Employees fear they’ll be disrupted out of their jobs and left behind. Entry-level workers and students worry about the stability of their future careers and how they can secure their future.

As a result, having an always-learning digital mindset is critical to success. At PwC, we’re building digital strength across our organization. How? Through a learning initiative called “Digital Fitness.” It’s driven by an app our firm created that empowers a culture of personal growth and enables it by testing and teaching digital competencies.

In the 21st century, fulfilling our potential requires a commitment to well being (e.g. physical, mental, emotional and spiritual), relevance to our broader society - and maintaining our digital fitness.  We must manage and sustain our personal energy to be our best at work and home. We want to make a difference in our communities and society. And regardless of our roles, we need to possess the knowledge and skills for a digital, data driven economy.

Our approach to digital fitness includes skills and knowledge, and also relationships (e.g. online presence, engaging others to learn and innovate, developing a diverse personal network, customer centricity), mindset (e.g. curiosity, experimenting and confidence), and behaviors (e.g. lifelong learning to stay current, collaboration and seeking insight to innovate).  The point is that while digital fitness includes learning new skills and knowledge - it’s also about the mindset, behaviors and relationships that are critical for continuous learning, and enable innovation in organizations. This effort has been so effective that we are now working with clients to utilize the platform to launch similar digital initiatives at their companies.

Many of our people are assessing their digital skills and then burnishing their capabilities with knowledge-building content aligned with a progressive skills framework. This isn’t a management upskilling gimmick. This is a carefully constructed, organization-wide program and app that personalizes the experience for each staff member. First, users complete a quiz and receive their digital aptitude score. As leaders at PwC, we’ve compared our own scores and are nowhere near perfect. And that’s the point, nobody is.

After taking the assessment, the app directs the learner to videos and learning assets in areas of interest or areas that need focus. They are queried throughout the learning experience to reinforce the material. The application also provides tutorials on PwC’s own digital expertise, so our diverse capabilities are better understood across our company. The tutorials follow a holistic framework and include:

• augmented and virtual reality
• prototyping, coding and app development
• journey mapping
• 3D printing
• internet of things
• beacons, drones
• cyber security
• cloud
• data analysis and visualization
• design thinking

There’s also a fast track element that is more immersive, sending some users back to their teams as accelerators or digital leaders. And, as technology is always changing, this is a continuing process with user’s scores dropping if they don’t keep learning.

Obviously, the benefits go well beyond a smarter workforce. But they start there. In today’s competitive labor marketplace, businesses can’t simply recruit their way out of a digital deficit. There simply aren’t enough qualified people. Even if there were, an engaged employee population makes an organization stronger as a whole than as the sum of its parts. As technology pervades all that we do in business, a culture that thinks across sectors and applications wins in a digitally driven environment.

Digital fitness drives business benefits - enabling better value and quality for customers/clients, a more digital experience and transformation of processes, and lower costs.  Digital fitness builds confidence as people experience increased relevance, the value of new skills and knowledge - while securing their future. At PwC, we know digital empowerment for our own people will help deliver better results for our clients, who are trying to leap ahead of the digital curve. We believe digital knowledge is to the 21st century, as literacy was to the 20th century. Its new vocabulary and concepts will all play an increasingly important role in major societal issues including how our democracies and capitalism function. Those who choose to opt out, risk being left behind. That’s not a risk we’re willing to take.

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