The two-finger typing game is all around the place. Nobody ever wanted to get over it. One time learning and then you can improve and gain proficiency. In an age when we wouldn’t have even seen each other’s handwriting, we keep struggling day in and day with our keyboard. We don’t even feel the drudgery as we have never done in better. Ask a person who does ten fingers typing and then he will tell you the difference. The added medical conditions of wrist, fingers and the neck. It might also have an impact on the back. But how many of us have ever thought that learning typing the professional way can transform our lives. Institutions have not done, schools don’t teach, the same applies for all job requirements as well.
The difference is the same as that between occupational therapy and physiotherapy. You learn to live with a disability. With the onset of the completely digital world more than a decade back and then the COVID-19 now, has left us with no choice. The situation we don’t accept is grave. How can we define the new professional? There is a clear cut and a very straight answer. A new professional’s half capability is his professional expertise and the other half is his expertise with technology. What is the level of expertise required for any job description can be very easily worked and there is a necessity that it should be worked out for every class of professionals. We have entered a world of reskilling, if not done, we would lose the precious time of our human resources, without even realizing it.
Professions which have done well have been the ones who got wedded to the right technology, kept improving upon it and gained proficiency. As things move at the pace they do, we might not even know what is happening all around us. The profession – domain – technology has to be concreted once and for all. There are any number of professions and levels today, where people are not able to create a perfect word document or make a PowerPoint presentation. How they operate and deliver nobody knows. If Infosys could not pick up the domain knowledge, which it was duty bound to honor the contract it got into, then on the other side too, there were not enough tech enabled professionals who could have taken it to task.
Steve Jobs said we are at the intersection of humanity and technology. We can very well read it as the domain. Technology cannot come and do magic in every domain, at the very best, it provides the platform, that too the professionals should know how to use and maintain. Software cannot be written in any field if the technologist does not understand it fairly well. A doctor does not blame anybody else for his diagnosis, what is requirement gathering in software development then? The professional throws away all his responsibility at the first sight of a technologist / technology company, as if they would deliver you the moon. We can see the fate of the Police in dealing with cybercrimes and that of the criminal justice system in its interface with the digital world. We cannot buy or declare technology, it has to go beyond skin deep, to become a part of us, to be a true professional. Conversely, the technologist also needs to take a call, they cannot keep blaming the rest of the professional world. For both the message is, learn and deliver.
HALF DOMAIN AND HALF TECHNOLOGY IS THE DIGITAL AGE PROFESSIONAL IN EVERY DOMAIN.
Sanjay Sahay