Digital Competence: A new wave for the T-Rexes

Unavoidably so, the pandemic has shown us a new way to work. A whole new dynamic to our work lives which most of us took for granted and some of us felt over-prepared for. If you ask me, this global crisis made us bring our best foot forward.

Could you have imagined staying in a corner in your bedroom or some designated space in your garage/living room/store and deciding to spend the next 8 hours there? Deciding to binge on your favorite TV show on another screen while finishing up your reports or prepping up for the presentation. Also, let us take a moment to admire and appreciate all the Zoom/Google Meet/Go To Meetings and countless other meetings where turning on video wasn’t a necessity. I mean who would want to see my tired ass face potentially still yawning and rubbing my eyes in the Monday morning meeting. Team Meeting calls without videos are a savior for the CEOs of the “I woke up like this” look (sarcasm and not actual glam look).
  

But enough diversion and focusing on the topic at hand: Digital Competence. Honestly, I am 100% sure there would be better people to write about this or even someone from the industry who can better slam this into a dunk (get it? Slam Dunk?). I am a guy in my 30s working in Marketing and Sales as well as with experience in Digital Marketing and Social Media. So, I know a thing or two and that is it. But if a current pandemic is to be taken into account, I think I shone brighter now than before. I get it that, like most other marketing and salespeople out there, we might not have gotten the sales to the level where we’d or our managers would like to see it but that is beyond the point there. My bloom happened with the emergence of “digital” into the scene. We can chant all the Marketing Mantras as we want but at the end of the day we were, and still so if it were not for the pandemic, would be doing most of our work physically. This cloud showed us a very vivid silver lining that you do not need to be present in one place when you could potentially be Omnipresent! Quite literally so.

The idea of digital competence for me and for so many other employers and employees is not that you need to learn to hack into a server or learn how to code in at least Java, Python, and HTML. It is that you are aware of the products that can and will help you. It is that you do not have to fear all new technology (unless it is SkyNet, in which case – RUN FOR YOUR LIVES). There are products designed to make your life easier and if you do not move on to an easier and much more relatable platform, you will be left behind. I am sorry to break this to you, but Life is a race. And you must be the best there is for yourself. You must learn new things and even break new records if you can. But even with all the resources, if you are maintaining a social distancing rule with the whole digital literacy and competency, then the wave is coming for you.

I still remember when my parents would tell me to stop playing with my phone so much or stop playing with my laptop so much. Funnily enough, they thought all I did was play with either my phone or laptop. Granted, I did not actually do something that could help me in my education but those times when I spent with my phone or computer made me less afraid of the machine. It helped me understand, even if a little, how I can use these things to my need. And that has now borne the fruit to help me in my job. Who would have thought that the kid who did not have many friends growing up and wasn’t the most popular guy would get good at his job because he can work around with technologies around him?

15 years ago, if someone had told you that there will be phones 10% thinner than the last generation phones and 50x faster and with a camera that puts power literally into their fingertips, who’d have believed it? I remember a story my father once told me – Once a tourist came to a village from the city. This was mid 1960/s or 70s, mind you. And he brought along a radio to the village. In the evening he would tune into the national broadcasting station and the radio would come to life. It would sing and talk, and the naïve villagers would just stare in awe. One of them decided to muster the courage and ask, how is this box doing this? Are there tiny people inside with musical instruments who can sing? What is this sorcery? To this, the tourist burst into laughter and told them that it worked from batteries (remember those chunky ones?) and it works on frequencies/radio waves. This was nothing short of magic to the village folk. And this story has stuck with me for a long time because most of us right now are like the naïve villagers. We will buy the latest phones and laptops and we will need what the other guy/girl is having but we will not know how to work with it. This is both hilarious and sad. We are afraid of the new updates, yet we are also sad that cannot perform in our fields. We are graduates of the finest institutions, but our Digital Competencies are still nowhere in the range of a newborn, most of the time. Infants these days need Youtube to sing them to sleep or calm their sugar-high brains but most of us do not even know how to download video from the internet. Younger kids are now playing PUBG and FreeFire and Call of Duty on their mobile phones and you can’t even figure out how to turn your presentation into a pdf so the formatting doesn’t get messed up when you are sending it.

These things are basics now. The new generation of graduates will have far more digital competency thanks to the education system all around the world that is now focused on providing them the education of the future. As for us, working-class graduates from decade/s ago, it is either learn the new dance or just be like a T-Rex. OBSOLETE!