Citi Business Festival: Acquiring digital skills key to securing employment – Maximus Ametorgoh

Chief Executive Officer of Popout, Maximus Ametorgoh, has highlighted the importance for persons seeking employment and those hoping to remain relevant in their fields to acquire some level of digital skills to increase their value.

According to him, the growing rate of digitization in the country also comes with the opportunity for employment in that space for people who have the requisite skills and expertise.

Speaking during the Citi Business Festival on-air series, on the topic, ‘Understanding the digital economy’, Maximus Ametorgoh, said it has become critical for employed and persons prospecting for jobs to have some IT-related expertise to stay abreast with the trends.

“According to a report that I read, in the next 3 years, 6.5 million people with digital skills will be needed in the labour force. Digital marketing, analytics data science, cybersecurity amongst others. So those are the things one should be thinking about. How do I improve my digital skills to stay relevant because if the company is going to sack people they will look at digital skills first before traditional skills. If you are an accountant, and you don’t understand the software, and they bring accounting software that you need to customise for the business, you may be laid off. Since you are already an employee, and you understand the working of the company and how accounting is done
within that space, with your digital skills, you can easily customise it. The accountant who doesn’t have that will be sacked automatically,” he said.

Unemployment in the country, especially amongst the youth, remains a major concern and the government has been making some efforts to address the situation.

But the growing adoption of digitization might further worsen the situation, as it could reduce demand for traditional employment. Unfortunately, many are acquiring expertise in such areas, which continue to have a dwindling demand for personnel.

He also urged businesses who are still stuck in the brick-and-mortar approach of doing business to quickly adopt some level of digitization or risk extinction.

“What will kill or make the solutions that I offer better? So, you have to think about how to incorporate the spirit of innovation into your workers so that they can come out with ideas as to how you can reformat either your processes or the products that you are offering. So you can stay relevant to become a market leader or a market player. You don’t need to always be the first but you must stay relevant. For instance, if you are selling waakye in some corner, somebody could be selling waakye 5 kilometres away and because of technology, they can get all your customers by going online and buying the waakye and delivering it to their homes, and you still be there waiting for queues in front of you,” he added.