Why Your Business Needs Digital Training

Most business owners know they need a more digitally capable team. The harder question is knowing where to start, which skills actually matter, and how to build a training programme that sticks.

“Digital skills are no longer a nice-to-have for SMEs in Northern Ireland,” says Ciaran Connolly, founder of Belfast-based digital agency ProfileTree. “We work with businesses across every sector and the gap between teams that have invested in training and those that haven’t is now visible in their search rankings, their conversion rates, and their ability to use AI tools that their competitors are already running.”

This guide breaks down what digital training actually covers in 2025, which roles need it most, and how to make a business case for the investment.

Why Your Business Needs Digital Training: The Digital Transformation

If you were born before about the year 2000, you probably understand how technology has dramatically transformed the world we live in, because you’ve witnessed that digital transformation.

Everything has become digitised, and machine interaction is taking over human interaction. From a sociological viewpoint, this definitely has pros and cons. But how has this affected the world of business? Has it made things better or worse?

As a business owner, it’s always important to look at the hard data.

Statistics that Matter in the Digital Transformation

It’s vital to think about how digital training might impact your day-to-day operations, and, ultimately, your bottom line.

Let’s look at some numbers and facts to better understand the major role technology plays in business today, and the problems businesses are facing during the digital transformation:

• Lloyds Bank Business Digital Index: ~22% of UK SMEs still lack foundational digital skills
• British Chambers of Commerce: digital skills shortages consistently ranked as a top growth constraint
• Invest NI research: digital capability identified as key differentiator for NI export growth
• Cut entirely. No replacement needed; the point is made through narrative

So, let’s think about how digital training can help your business to meet these needs.

Digital Knowledge Gap in the Market

So, where does the problem come from? While most businesses agree that digital transformation is the big thing going on right now across all sectors, most employees and senior executives lack the required skills to actually transform their operations.

There is a genuine fear of a digital skills gap created by the boom in the digital economy versus the number of people who are trained to work in it. Hundreds of thousands of jobs can’t be filled in the UK because the workforce lacks the right skills.

Digital disruption is the worst nightmare for many CEOs. We’ve all seen how huge organisations and industries have completely faded out or been replaced by digital alternatives such as Netflix, Amazon, and Uber.

This shouldn’t be scary; on the contrary, it represents a huge opportunity of growth if companies and employees are willing to adapt to change.

Automation VS the Gap

Because of the digital skills gap, employers will utilise automated technology in order to fill this gap. In other words, replacing humans with machines. What makes this fear valid is that, historically speaking, there have been many cases where technology has replaced human jobs.

So, if digital transformation has huge potential, and there’s a lack of skilled employees with digital expertise, one can easily point out the answers to the question of why your business needs digital training.

What Exactly Is Digital Training?

Many overlook this question when talking about that digital knowledge gap. What exactly are those digital skills? Does it refer to digital marketing, coding, or mastering Microsoft Office programs? What level of skills are these businesses looking for?

The answer is digital literacy. In other words, the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information requires both cognitive and technical skills.

In the modern workplace, it’s almost impossible to identify the exact set of digital skills needed to land any job. Therefore, when speaking about why your business needs digital training, you need to point out which set of skills your field needs.

It could start with answering emails and accessing the company’s files on the cloud system, such as Google Drive or Dropbox. It could end up with writing a website’s code. Some jobs require Excel proficiency, while others don’t require Excel use at all.

Which Jobs Need Digital Training?

Of course, all IT-related jobs need digital training as it’s a core function of their jobs. HTML5, MongoDB, iOS, Android, and Mobile App are among the fastest-growing keywords found in job postings.

Sales and Customer Service

Apart from that, those who work in marketing, customer service, sales, retail, writing, and management are all required to learn different digital skills in order to up their game in the market.

For instance, customer service and sales agents need to be familiar with CRM systems. Some companies even list previous experience with a specific advanced CRM as a plus in their job posting.

Sales and customer service agents also need to be comfortable contacting new prospects and clients through a range of different digital media. This requires a relatively high level of digital literacy.

Writers

Writers, on the other hand, now do most of their work on digital applications. This includes drafting, editing, proofreading and publishing, either on the cloud or offline. Increasingly, writers also use digital collaboration tools.

In addition, if you’re writing for a website or an online blog, your writers need to be aware of SEO techniques and some graphic design basics. This often means knowing Google Analytics and Photoshop.

Your business needs digital training because the responsibilities of a professional writer have changed so much, even in the last five years. In fact, many young copywriters today have never written for print at all.

If you employ writers who have been in the industry for a little longer, it’s important to upskill them to ensure they are up to date with the needs of the marketing industry in the digital era.

Digital Marketing

Meanwhile, in the marketing field, digital marketing is becoming increasingly important every year. Chief Marketing Officers predict that digital budgets will account for more than 75% of the marketing budget, and mobile will account for more than 50% of the marketing budget.

Therefore, marketing specialists who do not have any digital expertise will be completely lost. If you employ an in-house marketing team, digital training is absolutely essential to ensure their ongoing effectiveness and success.

Data Visualisation

Another skill that also benefits different jobs is data visualisation. In fact, some people take up data visualisation as their career. Data visualisation is a way to help people understand the significance of data by placing it in a visual context.

Think of this role as a bridge between technical and non-technical roles. It’s also a way to improve communications between different teams within your organisation, who may not have a great deal of common experience or expertise.

You’re taking the data collected by analysts and transforming it into a form anyone can understand. This could be beneficial for employees from different backgrounds, such as finance, marketing, and sales.

Cost Reduction through Digital Training

The first reason why your business needs digital training is that it reduces your company’s expenses. Perhaps you’re wondering how this works. To answer that, let’s look at some of the ways digital training can reduce costs.

Digital Training to Reduce Additional Hires

The first perspective is that due to the scarcity of digitally skilled applicants, it usually costs a lot to hire one. That’s before you even account for sunk costs, like recruitment fees, and the time of your HR staff.

So, instead of hiring a new employee, why don’t you invest in one of your in-house employees? You’d be surprised at how many of your employees would be interested to learn new skills.

Some of them would even welcome a career shift if they were offered the proper training.

In other words, you’ll be paying money for your employees’ digital training to save money. This is a real two-birds-one-stone strategy.

Efficiency Savings through Digital Training

The second perspective is that once the training is over, you can now invest in new digital tools that’ll also make your business process faster and more efficient by decreasing the error rate.

Organisations that offer comprehensive training have considerably higher income per employee than those with less comprehensive training.

Digital Training to Drive Revenue

The last perspective is that engaging with digital tools can actually drive revenue. Digitising your marketing and sales departments would empower your employees by opening up an extra channel where they can reach out to potential customers.

Digitising your sales and marketing processes also allows your teams to harness data to improve their offering and reach customers in a more targeted and effective way.

Increasing Productivity

Many businesses fail to see that employees often have their career and personal development as one of their highest priorities. Therefore, when a company invests in its employees’ personal development, it immediately increases the productivity of its employees.

Employees feel stimulated, and their motivation to dedicate time to their learning helps them reduce wasted working time. So, their overall productivity increases.

In addition, when employees can apply what they have just learned immediately and see the results, they feel accomplished. Thus, increased productivity is a good reason why your business needs digital training.

Improving Employee Retention

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development estimates the average cost of replacing an employee at roughly six to nine months of their salary, so skills training can cut costs by improving employee turnover.

As employees feel motivated and appreciated, their loyalty to the company they work for becomes stronger. Employees appreciate that their company’s investment in them adds value and weight to their own professional resumes.

That makes employees want to pay forward that value by investing in the same company that invested in them. For that reason, you can use higher retention rates as a reason why your business needs digital training.

Why Businesses Hold Back on Digital Training (And How to Move Past It)

Most businesses that delay digital training are not short of motivation. They understand the value. The delay usually comes from one of four practical objections, each of which has a straightforward answer.

“We don’t have time”

This is the most common reason given, and it is also the most solvable. The assumption behind it is that training means pulling staff out of their roles for full days at a time. In practice, the most effective business digital training is structured differently.

Short, focused sessions of two to three hours, built around real work tasks your team is already doing, tend to produce better results than day-long workshops. Staff apply what they have learned immediately rather than returning to a backlog and forgetting most of it by the following week.

ProfileTree structures its training programmes around client operational hours and can deliver sessions in formats that work around school holidays, busy trading periods, and shift patterns. The question is not whether you can afford the time. It is whether you can afford to keep losing time to the skills gap.

“Our team is resistant to change”

Resistance to digital training is rarely about stubbornness. It almost always comes from anxiety: concern about being assessed, exposed as struggling, or replaced by technology.

Training that starts from a practical, non-judgemental baseline and shows quick wins in the first session tends to bring resistant team members around quickly. When staff see that AI tools make their specific tasks easier rather than threatening their role, the dynamic shifts.

The framing matters too. Training positioned as an investment in the team rather than a response to poor performance produces very different reactions from the same group of people.

“We’re not sure what we need”

This is a reasonable position. Digital training covers an enormous range of skills, from basic cloud tools through to AI implementation, and not every business needs the same things.

The practical starting point is a training needs assessment: a structured review of your team’s current capability set against what your business actually requires them to do. This identifies specific gaps rather than producing a generic syllabus, and it means the training budget is spent on skills that produce a measurable return rather than content that does not connect to your day-to-day work.

ProfileTree offers training needs assessments for Northern Ireland SMEs as the first step in any training programme. Get in touch to discuss what a review would involve for your business.

“We’ve tried training before and it didn’t stick”

One-off training events rarely produce lasting change. A half-day workshop without follow-up, without practical application, and without connection to real work tasks is largely forgotten within two weeks. This is not a reflection on the people who attended; it is how memory and skill acquisition work.

Training that connects directly to the tools and tasks people use every day, followed by structured application and periodic reinforcement, produces measurably better retention. Short modules revisited over several weeks outperform single intensive sessions for most skill types.

If previous training has not delivered results, the issue is usually programme design rather than the team’s ability to learn.

Strategies that Your Business Must Leverage During the Digital Training

Now, you understand that there are multiple reasons why your business needs digital training. However, there’s one thing that one should highlight. Some people get so impressed by those digital abilities that they start thinking that “digital” is a magic wand that would solve all their business problems.

That’s not true. While adopting new digital tools, you must also adopt new perspectives.

The aforementioned development of new competencies revolves around the capacities to be more agile, people-oriented, innovative, customer-centric, streamlined, efficient and able to induce opportunities to change the status quo and tap into new information- and service-driven revenues.

Without aligning these values, your same old business problems will become friends with your new digital tools. In other words, your team’s fresh perspective and their innovative, go-get-it attitude are what create solutions for your business problems through digital technology.

Where to Find Digital Training

Of course, there are tons of digital skills that your staff can acquire. For every skill, you will find many courses that you can apply to, both online and in class.
Sources for online courses are platforms such as Coursera, Lynda, LinkedIn for business, Udemy, and many other universities that offer online education. Here are recommended posts for some of the digital skills mentioned earlier:

Working with a Local Agency

For Northern Ireland businesses, working with a Belfast-based agency like ProfileTree means training is tailored to the local market, delivered by people who understand UK-specific platforms, regulations, and business conditions. ProfileTree’s digital marketing training programmes cover everything from SEO and content strategy through to AI tools and Google Analytics 4.

ProfileTree’s Future Business Academy

ProfileTree’s AI training arm, Future Business Academy, provides structured AI literacy and implementation training for SME teams. Programmes cover practical AI tool use, prompt engineering for business tasks, and how to integrate AI into existing workflows without disrupting operations.

Online Platforms for Self-Directed Learning

For specific technical skills, self-directed learning through platforms like Google’s Digital Garage, HubSpot Academy, and LinkedIn Learning provides accessible, structured courses. Google’s Digital Garage is free and covers digital marketing fundamentals with a UK-relevant curriculum. HubSpot Academy courses on content marketing, SEO, and inbound marketing are also free and widely respected.

For SEO specifically, Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO and Google’s own Search Central documentation are the most accurate free resources available.

For data visualisation, Microsoft’s free Power BI learning path and Google’s Looker Studio tutorials are practical starting points that connect directly to tools most businesses already use.

AI Tools and Automation: The Fastest-Growing Training Need

A few years ago, AI tools were discussed as something businesses might need to think about eventually. That moment has passed. As of 2025, tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and a growing range of marketing-specific AI platforms are already being used by competitors across every sector, including the ones your business operates in.

The challenge for most SMEs is not access. Many capable AI tools have free tiers sufficient for small business use. The barrier is knowledge: understanding which tools are worth your time, how to use them effectively, and how to build them into your existing workflows without creating new problems or security risks.

What AI Training for Business Actually Covers

Practical AI training for SMEs is not about learning to code or understanding how large language models work at a technical level. It focuses on application.

• Content and communications: Using AI to produce first drafts of emails, proposals, reports, social media posts, and web copy. The key skill is learning to brief AI tools precisely, review their output critically, and edit efficiently rather than accepting raw output as finished work.
• Customer service and enquiry handling: AI chatbots and automated response tools can handle routine queries, freeing staff for work that requires human judgement. For businesses receiving high volumes of similar enquiries, this produces measurable time savings quickly.
• Data analysis and reporting: AI tools built into Excel, Google Sheets, and standalone platforms can identify patterns in business data, generate summaries, and produce reports that would otherwise require hours of manual work.
• Search visibility and AI-driven discovery: This is an area many businesses have not yet addressed. Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, and Perplexity are now returning AI-generated answers for commercial queries your customers are using. Businesses that appear in those answers are gaining visibility that does not show up in traditional click data. Understanding how to structure your content and online presence to be cited in AI answers is now a core component of digital training, not an advanced add-on.
• Prompt engineering for business tasks: The ability to write clear, specific prompts that produce useful AI output is a practical skill. Teams that learn this well get significantly more value from the same tools than those using them casually.

The Risk of Not Training Your Team on AI

Most SMEs are accessing roughly 10% of what AI tools can do, according to ProfileTree’s experience across more than 1,000 AI training engagements with businesses across the UK and Ireland. The gap is not technical; it is training. Teams that have not been shown how to use AI tools properly either avoid them entirely or use them in ways that create more work than they save.

There is also a risk dimension. Teams using AI tools without guidance are more likely to input sensitive client or business data into platforms without understanding the privacy implications, to publish AI-generated content that damages search rankings, or to make decisions based on AI output without understanding where it can be wrong.

ProfileTree’s AI Training for Northern Ireland SMEs

ProfileTree has delivered AI training to more than 1,000 businesses across the UK and Ireland since launching structured AI programmes. The training is built around practical application rather than theory, with participants working on real business scenarios from their own sector rather than abstract examples.

Programmes are available through two routes. ProfileTree’s agency team delivers bespoke in-person and remote AI training for business teams, built around the specific tools and workflows a company is already using. Future Business Academy, ProfileTree’s dedicated training platform, offers both free introductory AI courses and structured programmes for teams that want to go further.

For businesses in Northern Ireland ready to start, Future Business Academy’s free AI masterclass covers ChatGPT fundamentals, prompt engineering for business tasks, AI safety and data privacy settings, and a practical implementation plan you can act on immediately. ProfileTree’s AI business training programmes cover more advanced implementation support for teams working through specific use cases.

Real-World Examples: Digital Training Done Right

When considering any business investment, it’s worth thinking about similar companies which have been through it already. These inspirational, successful digital transformations act as additional reasons why your business needs digital training.

A Professional Services Firm in Belfast

A mid-sized accountancy practice approached ProfileTree after noticing that competitors were appearing in search results they were not. A training programme covering Google Analytics 4, basic SEO content principles, and LinkedIn publishing for their partners led to a measurable increase in organic enquiries within six months. The partners involved also reported more productive conversations with the agency handling their paid search, because they could now read their own reports.

Domino’s Pizza: A Retail Digital Transformation Case Study

Domino’s turnaround is one of the most cited examples of digital capability driving business performance. After a poor period for brand perception in 2009, the company committed to a digital-first strategy: online ordering, a customer-focused app, and order tracking. By building genuine digital capability into their operations rather than bolting on digital tools without staff training, Domino’s shifted to a position where the majority of their orders are now placed digitally. The lesson for SMEs is that digital tools without trained people to use them consistently deliver far less value than the technology promises.

FAQ

Final Thoughts

The businesses in Northern Ireland growing their digital presence most effectively in 2025 are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones whose teams understand how digital works and can apply that knowledge consistently.

The skills gap is real, but it is also closeable. A well-structured training programme, built around what your team actually needs rather than a generic syllabus, produces measurable results. Whether the priority is getting more from your website, building confidence with AI tools, or reducing dependency on external agencies for tasks your team could handle in-house, the starting point is the same: an honest assessment of where the gaps are.

ProfileTree’s digital training and AI business training programmes are built for Northern Ireland SMEs. If you’d like to talk through what a training programme for your team would look like, get in touch with the ProfileTree team.