TECHDIGEST – Capacity building is the improvement in an individual’s or organization’s facility to produce, perform or deploy. According to the United Nation, Capacity building is the process of developing and strengthening the skills, instincts, abilities processes and resources that organization and communities need to survive, adapt and thrive in a fast-changing world. Skill development and training are needed around the world, many people are deprived of capacities and skills crucial to digital era. Digital capacity building must be more needs-driven and tailored to individual and national circumstances and better coordinated globally.

According to the 2017 Global Innovation Index, several African Countries have been classified as’ ’Innovation Achievers’’ in the Continent including Kenya, Uganda and Senegal. Yet, many African Nations are not able to fully benefit from global advancement in technology. However, in today’s world, technology plays an increasingly important role in the economy and society as a whole. Digital skills can help you increase your employability prospects, advance your career and make the most of modern technology. UNESCO defines digital skills as the ability to use digital devices, community applications and networks to access and manage information. Digital skills may give you an advantage in specific technical careers such as marketing, design, development and data science.  Capacity building in digital skills is strengthening digital capacities and skills to meet the demands of digital world skill development and training. So, capacity building in digital skills is to adopt and develop new practices with digital technology in order to be able to analyze and develop a critical perspective on content and underlying systems, services and network.

Acquiring digital skills is very important as the world is a fast-evolving digital world. Current technologies are being replaced by more advanced ones increasingly rapidly, so having a strong digital skillset, feeling confident in your own capabilities to navigate through a constantly changing digital environment, will be very important for future employment.

I strongly believe that building or owning a digital skill set will contribute or help to:

·         To adapt the right digital devices, applications, software and systems.

·         Find, review, organize and share information effectively

·         Handle data appropriately and establish good data security practices.

·         Be able to communicate and collaborate in digital setting.

·         Use different online resources and tools to help study remotely and engage effectively with your learning

·         Understand how to protect yourself, other colleagues, to stay safe in digital environment.

Conclusively, digital capabilities as the skills knowledge and understanding which help someone to live, learn and work in a digital society, help us to use variety of technologies, appropriately and effectively in different spaces, places and situations. Not only do digital capabilities help to engage and communicate with other people in your personal life or whilst you to learn, they help you to succeed in the world of work.

Employers are increasingly looking at what digital capabilities applicants and employees have. Skills in creating documents, presentations, spreadsheet and communicating via email and social media are areas which are important to most organizations.

They want people to use technology to access information, be creative, innovative, solve problems, communicate, participate, learn and support others in digital spaces. Building and developing digital capabilities will definitely help to become better prepared and relevant for increasingly digital world.

Emmanuel Otori has over 9 years of experience working with 100 start-ups and SMEs across Nigeria. He has worked on the Growth and Employment (GEM) Project of the World Bank, GiZ, Consulted for businesses at the Abuja Enterprise Agency, Novustack, Splitspot and NITDA.

He is the Chief Executive Officer at Abuja Data School

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By Emmanuel Otori

TECHDIGEST – Many organizations are seeking ways to offer their products and services to customers in an efficient way in order to save time, ease the processing of the orders and provide the highest quality of delivery as at the expected time.

One major opportunity that most start-ups are not taking advantage of is the availability of data in the public domain as well as the internal data they are gathering to make business intelligent decisions.

Organizations are drowning in an overwhelming amount of data and know little or nothing about gaining insights from the data and turning them into actionable goals and objectives.

The purpose of data is to act with precision and less assumption which makes it possible for a business to thrive by reducing the probability of making errors to the barest minimum.

How To Gain Actionable Insights From Data

Data gathering

Gathering of data is the most rigorous step as without data, the ability to make decision is hampered. Assumptions would thrive and there would be much gap in the margin of errors. Before collecting data, the scope of the project in terms of questions to be asked in the survey, the duration of the project and field enumerators to be used as well as medium for gathering the data should be known. These tools are for gathering data Surveymonkey, Google forms, Microsoft forms, Hubspot and Google analytics.

Data Cleansing

Data cleansing or wrangling is the art of removing unwanted items not needed in working with the data collected such as symbols, extra spacing, grammatical error etc.

Data Analysis

To analyze any form of data that has been collected, these tools are the most comprehensive tools in the marketplace, they include Microsoft Excel, SPSS, STATA, Python, R programming, MATLAB, E-views.

Data Visualization

Data visualization is the art of representing data in the form of charts in order for comprehension by stakeholders. Examples of tools for data visualization are Power BI, Tableau etc

Business Intelligence

The action taken having seen the feedback hidden in the data collected is called business intelligence (BI). This is the most important aspect in order to act with precision.

What is Predictive Analytics?

Predictive Analytics is a form of using records from past data collected over a period of time to determine what the future holds in the form of forecasts. Predictive Analytics is a branch of data analysis that helps to make decisions in the business world.

Tools for Predictive Analytics

There are free and paid tools for predictive analytics and they are numerous in the form of software applications. They can be utilized by anyone who has competence in gathering data from customers through surveys or from a database and knowledge of which tool is applicable to best analyze certain data.

Non-coding tools

Microsoft Excel

SPSS

STATA

Coding tools

Python

R Programming

Application of Predictive Analytics

Stock Control
Staff Utility
Price fixing
Managing of Peak Times
Determining call rates

The future of business will be driven by African start-ups that can use the data gathered to study behavioural tendencies of customers and how to serve their needs with a greater level of efficiency.

Emmanuel Otori has over 9 years of experience working with 100 start-ups and SMEs across Nigeria. He has worked on the Growth and Employment (GEM) Project of the World Bank, Consulted for businesses at the Abuja Enterprise Agency, Novustack, Splitspot and NITDA. He is the Chief Executive Officer at Abuja Data School.

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