Data skills gap costing businesses almost a month of productivity per employee every year, survey finds

Businesses are losing out on almost a month of productivity from each employee due to widespread data skills gaps among their workforce, a new survey has found.

This is according to Multiverse’s inaugural Skills Intelligence Report, released earlier this month. The report utilises data from Multiverse’s skills assessment and development platform, analysing the skills and productivity levels of over 12,000 employees across 18 major industries in the US and UK.

Multiverse is a UK-based company that focuses on apprenticeship and the provision of on-the-job learning.

The firm’s report found that workers spend an average of 14.3 hours per week on data tasks, equivalent to 36 per cent of their total working week.

However, the report added that a staggering 4.3 hours of that time is spent unproductively due to them having inadequate data skills.

Multiverse said that overall, workers spend more than 10 per cent of their total workweek ineffectively due to skill deficiencies, particularly in areas like data analysis, automation, and predictive modelling.

While there is an expectation for employees across all departments to be data literate, additional reports have indicated that only 39 per cent of employers provide data training to all employees. Around three quarters of business leaders believe that employees should learn about data on the job, yet by 2025, 70 per cent of employees are expected to use data in some way in their roles.

The inefficiency highlighted in Multiverse’s report resulted in a slowdown in project development and a longer time for products and services to get to the market.

It also acknowledged a paradox in the modern workplace, noting that while data has become integral to most roles, many employees still lack the fundamental skills needed to leverage it effectively.

The impact of the skills gap varies across industries, with the education sector reporting the highest proportion of unproductive time spent on data tasks at 38 per cent. This was followed closely by manufacturing and engineering at 36 per cent. Traditionally data-intensive sectors such as banking and finance still reported 35 per cent of data-related work time as unproductive.

While there are many significant challenges, 90 per cent of employees state that they want to improve their data skills. Additionally, 76 per cent of organisations surveyed aim to upskill existing employees, and a further 73 per cent are planning to reskill workers into new roles.

Euan Blair, Founder and CEO at Multiverse, remarked that companies are recognising the value of big data, “and many are collecting vast amounts of it.”

“But their employees are spending hours each week, struggling in spreadsheets, because they’ve never been trained in these areas that they’re now expected to know,” he continued.

“The economic cost of the time spend unproductively grappling with data tasks is in the billions. It’s something company need to take seriously. Companies have spent billions on software, but hardly anything on the skills needed to get the most from that software,” he added.