People Make Digital Transformation Real
The pace of digital change is rapid, and recent research by Dell Technologies and Vanson Bourne reveals this can be overwhelming. No industry is immune. The pressure to transform to stay competitive in the digital economy is immense. But organizations struggle with how to build a digital vision – and they realize that their most important asset, their people, need the skills to “go digital” as well. In fact, the research, Realizing 2030: A Divided Vision of the Future, shows that lack of workforce readiness is one of the top two barriers to digital progress.
Consider one of our customers, a local U.S. government authority, was evaluating a data center modernization. As plans began to take shape, skills gaps became a major concern, causing the customer to hesitate in committing to the transformational project. The tipping point in giving the customer confidence to move forward was the creation of an ongoing education strategy that would help develop and retain a skilled and certified team to drive the project.
Skills gaps can often be seen in IT, where organizations are rapidly moving from silo’d legacy infrastructure to dynamic, multi-cloud environments. The days of having a single role such as storage or server admin are being eclipsed by new roles that span multiple technologies such as networking, server, storage, cloud and virtualization, with a security-first mindset.
A recent IT Transformation study conducted by IDC for Dell found that a key differentiator between organizations that are the most agile and ready for transformation, and those that are the least ready, is that they view IT employee development as a strategic differentiator. 98% of the most advanced organizations incorporate training into IT’s overall strategic planning and all key initiatives, compared to only 38% of the least advanced.
Empowering Customers with the Skills to Gain the Edge in the New Digital Economy
The transformation journey begins with mapping the organization’s skills readiness to its ability to meet the challenges of rapidly evolving processes and technologies. In fact, the Vanson Bourne study found that 85% of business leaders advise aligning training to digital goals and strategy.
Transformation success increases when organizations begin their journey by building from three fundamental tenets:
- The skills needed to build and manage digital enterprises differ from the skills businesses possess today.
- Individuals need to learn and evolve, taking advantage of both formal and informal opportunities to do so.
- Companies need a development strategy that incorporates training and certification as an essential component for retaining and growing future-ready talent.
Dell Education Services is launching a set of new transformational certifications that helps develop the highly-skilled talent who can help companies make transformation real, achieve business goals and lead the competition.
These new certifications bridge skills gaps at every stage of transformational maturity. They establish and validate skills required for digital, IT, workforce, and security transformation, including:
- Understanding how to manage converged/hyper-converged platforms
- Developing expertise to enable automation and service delivery with multi cloud-solutions
- Incorporating critical security controls for Dell enterprise infrastructure
- Translating emerging business trends into the technology solutions and new operating models of the future-ready organization
The new highest level certification, Master Enterprise Architect, is an experience-based board review certification that identifies and validates those unique individuals who possess the technical acumen to architect modern and secure IT as a Service solutions, coupled with a holistic understanding of the business drivers that fuel digital transformation.
In addition to the Proven Professional certification, learners also have the opportunity to earn co-branded badges that demonstrate proficiency across Dell and VMware solutions.
These new certifications establish a new industry standard to validate the skills required for digital, IT, security and workforce transformation. The organization benefits by being able to establish teams of trusted advisors who, while having the skills to maximize the performance of today’s data center, also have proven capabilities to build and manage the digital enterprise of the future. At an individual level, these Proven Professional certifications validate expertise and the IT professional’s ability to be a critical influencer in charting the path of an organization’s transformation.
Making Skills Transformation Real
My story about the customer who required skills transformation to make their IT transformation real should resonate with everyone. Do you have confidence that you and your team are ready to compete in the digital economy? The race is on. Those who succeed will transform not only their processes and technologies, but most importantly, their people.
Are you ready to transform? Learn more by visiting the Dell Education Services website.
