DevOps Live: Humans have the attention span of a goldfish, and that's affecting how we learn

New technology is the best way to counter the skills gap

Technology skills are in high demand, but the old way of learning "just won't cut it". That was the message from Pluralsight's Marnie Threapleton, who was speaking at Computing's DevOps Live North event in Manchester this week.

The conversation now should not be about training but about the supply chain of technology skills, Pluralsight believes.

Marnie Threapleton is an account director at Pluralsight

Pluralsight is an education company that also has tools to quantify the spread of skills in organisations. Threapleton gave an example of work with Nationwide, where her company was able to analyse the capabilities available so that the insurer could make a decision about a technology platform to take on board,

The company works in this way because it believes that "The old way of learning technology just won't cut it… You're just going to be dead in the water." Digital disruption is not only changing technology, but people and the way that they learn.

Nature is driving this change in education, but not in a good way. According to a study by Harvard Business School, humans are evolving in the wrong direction: our attention span had dropped to eight seconds in 2015 - lower than that of a goldfish.

That means that the way that companies acquire and develop technology talent has to change - especially considering the 750,000 new tech jobs expected to be created in the UK by 2020.

"The old way of learning doesn't give visibility into the skills that you need and the ones that you don't have; it doesn't predict the skills you will need going forward. Only technology itself can unlock these ways," said Threapleton.

Pluralsight IQ is one example: a free service that 40,000 developers from Stack Overflow use to measure their individual skills competency against an industry benchmark every month.

Threapleton put ‘skill up and future proof' at the head of her list of necessary tasks that businesses must do to be successful. "Developing technology skills at scale is the superpower of the future - it is now your primary competitive advantage," she told delegates.