87% of French talent views digital training as essential to employment

The fourth industrial revolution is seeing new businesses emerging and disrupting regularly, and it brings up the question of the ability of employees, students, young and old to take advantage of digital tools. Now, the latest BVA study for Salesforce highlights the strengths and threats that digital technology can represent for French employees and their call for training.

Digitalism: Plenty assets for employees, but a threat to the most precarious of them

Digitalism is generally perceived as a tool that facilitates daily life by French employees, who very largely consider that it aids in their work (78%), and especially exchanges and communication (71%), or even that it makes their work more interesting (62%).

However, it can be stressful for 39% of employees, some also considering that it disrupts their balance between personal life/working life (36%).

Although half of French employees see digital in their work as an opportunity, fears do exist. 29% fear that their jobs will disappear as a result of digital development, particularly employees (33%) and people with low incomes (34%), and one in three employees (32%) expresses concern about its ability to bounce changes in the world of work, especially workers (40%) or seniors (39% of people aged 50 or over).

Employees expect their company to become more involved in training

Despite progress made since last year, most employees still consider that their company does not do enough in the field of training, whether it is the transmission of knowledge within the company (54 %), employees' information about their rights and the training they would be entitled to (57%), and more generally about access to external training (58%) or the Internet (61%) .

More specifically, in terms of training in digital tools, one out of two employees indicates that their company has offered their employees training in this area, with strong differences depending on the size of the company (more training offered in large companies than in smaller companies). 41% of employees also report that they have been trained in digital tools, but only 34% have done so through their company (9% have done this on their own or via an association).

The results may seem somewhat insufficient in terms of the importance that employees give to the subject (87% consider it important or indispensable to learn about digital tools and new technologies) but also with regard to the level of comfort of employees with digital tools, which is not as high as one might think: only 38% self-evaluate very positively on this subject, while 45% report a moderate mastery and that one in five is struggling (17%), especially among blue-collar workers (29%), seniors (22%) and those who have never completed training in this field (22%).

The company: a legitimate actor to provide training beyond the circle of employees

While companies specializing in the digital field are considered very largely legitimate to provide employees with digital skills training (85%), they are also considered legitimate to help intervene into external audiences, such as the unemployed or those excluded from the market such as (80%) of students (78%). On the other hand, they are more reserved about training children (55% versus 45% who do not consider this legitimate).

Digital training is globally considered beneficial for promoting access to employment for young non-graduates (80%) and people experiencing social exclusion (79%), but also to allow some social climbing (74%).

Finally, if young people were to be trained before they entered the world of work, employees believe that training should focus on the protection of personal data (50%) and computer security (42%), before ethics in the digital domain (29%), data management (26%), use of artificial intelligence (17%) and development/code (15%).

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