It’s time to "March Forward" to a different tune and redefine our critical skillsets
Every International Women's Day we hear the stats around gender diversity either improving at a glacial pace, or not improving at all. This, unfortunately, is also true in the technology industry, despite Australia working towards securing 1.2 million technology workers and jobs by 2030.
Recent initiatives, like the Tech Council of Australia's T-EDI standards, which aim to enhance diversity in the tech sector, are a step in the right direction. However, if we want immediate and long-lasting change, we need to start redefining the parameters of skillsets required for a career in tech as well as the value that diverse experiences bring to the industry.
AI should be a catalyst, not replacement, for innovation
It goes without saying that AI has become one of the biggest disruptors to the technology and business landscape of this decade. What used to be a buzzword or "crystal ball" type of prediction that was only tangibly understood through movies, has become part of our daily lives at work, home, and everywhere in between.
While some pundits fear that AI will replace tech jobs, those in the tech industry recognise it will enhance businesses' capacity to do more with less and any tech jobs focused on repetitive or manual tasks will be re-vamped to deliver different and greater value to an organisation.
For example, customer service operators can leverage AI to anticipate and automatically answer common customer questions from anywhere around the world, rather than copying and pasting the same answers with shift-workers sharing a 24/7 schedule. With their newly freed up time, these same customer service professionals can instead look at the data, feedback, and interactions with customers to focus on big picture thinking – How is the profile and needs of our customers changing? Where are the biggest information bottlenecks?
Likewise, AI is helping product teams approach their strategies and roadmaps in a smarter way. Could we iterate or create a new product feature to address customers' most pressing problems? Are there functions within our product that we can automate for our customers? Which market should we next expand into to meet growing demand?
This is the level of increased capacity that can lead to truly innovative thinking, but the outcomes will be limited if we keep hiring the same types of people.
Innovation thrives on diversity and vice versa – feed the cycle
Diverse teams bring diverse ideas, and if we want to address 50% of the population, we need to look at the 28% of women in the tech workforce and ask ourselves why these figures remain so low.
The type of big picture thinking and innovation in the aforementioned customer service example will only be possible if there are diverse teams across all areas of the business, including IT, HR, product, operations, and more. If, for example, an organisation had requests coming through from hundreds of customers across a range of industries and markets, it would make most sense for each of those requests to be treated with proportional weight and importance, based on the value and relevance to the business and its other customers.
However, if people in decision-making positions resonate with certain customers over others, there is a significant chance their own unconscious bias could skew their assessment of what requests to prioritise or action. Sound far-fetched? Recent research by the University of Sydney found people tend to discriminate in favour of those who show a similarity to them, even if that similarity comes from a random event like a coin toss.
The more diverse teams are, the more likely the business is to make strategic and value-adding decisions based on the data at hand. If the tech industry wants more innovative teams, it needs greater diversity. That has to start with asking ourselves what value an individual can tangibly bring to an organisation. Particularly in the tech sector, where computer science degrees are far from the only valuable asset a professional can offer to an organisation, we should be looking beyond the traditional boxes to be ticked. In addition, look for people skills, big picture thinkers, creativity, innovation, and the ability to critically assess a situation and ask what more could be done. These are sometimes referred to as "soft skills" but deserve to be redefined as critical to any organisation wanting to march forward in 2025.