7 Useful Digital Skills to Give You an Edge

When competing for a job in the realm of design and marketing online, these 7 digital skills are what you’ll need to have, find out here.

digital skills

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With the incredible advances that technology has and still is making, it is not difficult to understand why digital skills are becoming paramount to employability, now more than ever.

The landscape of business is becoming more and more digitally driven, which means that employees who lack computer skills are becoming more and more of a liability to companies looking to compete in a digital environment. With this in mind, this article has put together a handful of useful digital skills that should give you an edge in the increasingly tech driven modern world.

1. Digital Design Skills

As business continues on its inexorable slide towards the online, any business that wants to compete on a digital landscape will need to have a well designed and intuitive website. This means that the skills required to design, develop and implement a solid and user-friendly website are becoming more and more desirable. Happily, there are a myriad of ways for anyone interested to begin learning such skills online. Websites such as LinkedIn Learning and Udemy offer a broad range of courses that will hone your digital skills on the journey to mastering digital design.

2. SEO and Digital Marketing

The number of people that use the internet to guide their purchases and direct their business is, simply put, astronomical. With over three quarters of people researching online before they make a purchase, the digital market is every bit as important as the physical, if not more. This means that marketing skills such as SEO, which revolves around the process of bringing more searchers to your website, are becoming much more important to conducting any kind of business. These are digital skills that optimize a business’ online presence to make it more visible to customers and, functionally, it is not a difficult skill to learn. All you have to do is begin the process.

3. Data Processing and Excel

Even as the number of programs and the level of software in the business landscape continues to boom, Excel has remained a near essential part of any business endeavor. This is for a number of reasons, but the most relevant is that, through the years, Excel has remained one of the most versatile and powerful tools you can possibly hope for when it comes to data management and analysis. From the ability to easily represent incredibly complex data in the form of a graph, to the ability to automate complex mathematical computations, Excel provides invaluable support to almost every kind of data analysis that a business could engage with.

Fortunately, because of Excel’s continued and extreme usefulness in any and all business contexts, there are an enormous number of courses online, like the ones available from Computergaga.com, that will teach you everything there is to know about using Excel.

4. Programming and Computer Science

Very few people understand how computers truly work and that gives those who do an incredible advantage. Programming is an enormously complex field and with the number of different programming languages available, no one programmer will be able to provide for every issue. However, in a landscape where nearly nobody understands how coding works, being one of the few who does will make you immediately incredibly desirable as the landscape of business shifts further and further into the digital. There is no shortage of courses that will provide a foot into the programming skillset, which means that websites are your best friend.

5. Social Media Skills

As the landscape of technology has changed, so too has the atmosphere of business marketing and though SEO and digital marketing have become an incredibly important part of any marketing campaign, they are not the only aspects of a marketing campaign that should be considered. Social media has become a vital aspect of any large-scale marketing campaign and this is for a myriad of reasons. The most relevant of these reasons is that, with the integration of enormous amounts of free information on almost any topic, the dynamic of customer-business relationships has evolved.

Customers have been given not only a direct insight into the everyday workings of companies, but also a breadth of alternatives to almost any business available, which means that customer trust and retention have become the name of the game for any business that wishes to survive. This is where social media comes in. By humanizing a business and giving consumers a direct method to interact with the company, they can create a sense of familiarity and a bond between a business and its customers, encouraging loyalty and customer retention.

6. Analytics and Data Analysis

A key aspect to any business’ success lies in that company’s ability and willingness to collect as much data from its business dealings as possible and then analyze that data in order to improve upon their business practices in the future. In this way, businesses are able to adapt to and overcome any number of challenges that arise as the atmosphere of business shifts, which means that any individual who can be relied upon to quickly and efficiently collect and analyze data is going to be a desirable individual to a business. Fortunately, there are many, many pathways through which you can learn about data analysis and analytics, services such as CareerFoundry even offer free short courses to see whether data analytics is truly for you.

7. Digital Communication Skills

As more and more businesses, especially recently, take to allowing their workers to operate remotely, the ability to effectively, reliably, and succinctly communicate in a digital context is becoming more and more important. Because of this, employers have taken to seeking out individuals with good communication abilities within their applicant pools, especially for remote positions, as these are the individuals who can be most thoroughly relied upon to consistently maintain a high-quality, easily understandable discourse. While this skill is not enough to get you hired in its own right, it is an incredible boon to your employability when combined with other relevant skills.