Autodesk survey shows lack of good help and world events are on everyone’s mind
Autodesk has just delivered a report on the past, present and future of the three markets that its software relates to called the State of Design & Make Report. It is necessary for Autodesk to gauge exactly how affected its market is by world events to determine our level of worry in the present and the future. Quite a bit, as it turns out. Thirty-five percent of respondents in the Americas make world events and the economy their third biggest area of concern.
A report by a software vendor about the industries that its software serves is not without its bias. Of course, it will reveal that the most progressive companies have adopted the latest digital technologies. But less than half are current Autodesk customers. And the report also has a few surprises.
The findings are arranged along three main issues for over 2,500 people: business resilience, talent and sustainability. In addition to a 20-minute online survey, 76 business leaders and “futurists” were interviewed at length.
Respondents were from all over the world and grouped into Asia-Pacific-Australia-China (APAC), Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and the Americas. Country comparisons were limited to countries with more than 200 respondents: Australia, China, France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the U.S.
The highlights and surprises are below, along with commentary. For what can be expected in a business report, like how cost control/management/cost efficiencies are important, please download the 55-page report here.
Resilience
Global events made their way into Autodesk’s report as the third most challenging part of doing business. Given that the biggest war since World War II has been going on in Ukraine, it’s no surprise that Europe is the most affected (cited by 44% of EMEA). The COVID-19 pandemic, which hit Asia the hardest , was cited as most important by just 30 percent of APAC respondents and 35 percent of those in the Americas.
It’s been a tough couple of years, with the pandemic and the war playing havoc on the supply chain and economies worldwide. Surviving and recovering from tragedy, suffering and bankruptcy have given new meaning to “resiliency.”
As luck favors the prepared, so does digital transformation help a company overcome unforeseen events and be resilient, according to the report.
Business leaders and experts surveyed state benefits from digital transformation as:
- Reduced costs
- Increased innovation and better ideas
- The ability to launch products and services faster
“Seventy-nine percent of respondents said that the future growth of their company will depend on digital tools. Those that are keeping up with the pace of change in their industry are more likely to have plans to increase existing services, offer new services, and potentially expand into new markets,” according to the report.
Furthest on the digital transformation journey is the media and entertainment sector (though the inclusion of those in publishing and futurists, both groups that are 100% digitally transformed may be throwing off the total).
Talent
Finding and keeping talent is the number 1 challenge for all, cited by 48 percent of the respondents. The Americas were the hardest hit, with 56 percent of respondents feeling the talent pinch, followed by EMEA (49%) and least of all by APAC (43%) in a major country comparison.
More companies are reporting moving ahead on their digital transformation journeys. This is good news initially because it helped them be resilient, but it has also led to predicaments:
- Selling digital tools into a market without the market being able to make use of them is like Henry Ford selling automobiles to a nation without driver’s licenses. Digital tools require a different skill set. A construction worker displaced by an industry cannot move into pre-construction work if that requires skills to program robots on an assembly line, for example. Digital tools often require a formal education not found in the trades. Retraining is a good idea, but who to retrain? There is a labor shortage in the building trades and in manufacturing.
- The workforce has left the building. Sent home during the pandemic, plugging into the digitally transformed company from afar has become convenient and comfortable for the large mass of workers. They are not too excited to start commuting again and return to the office.
In technology, the only constant is change, but the pace of change in the past 3 years is more than in a whole lifetime (for millennials, anyway), say 72 percent of survey respondents.
Sustainability
With “sustainability” on everyone’s lips in every project, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that the motivation may not be genuine. A minority of respondents themselves felt an urge to be sustainable but are only doing so because they feel forced to be sustainable by customer demands. More than 80 percent of respondents said that customers are influencing their sustainability activities, regulations and their conscientious “young employees.”
Although 80 percent of respondents overall said that improving sustainability practices was a good long-term business decision, in actual practice, sustainability-related activity was far less.
In the U.S.—the biggest economy in the world—may be the most apathetic. Respondents from U.S. firms were more than twice as likely (19%) to report that they were not engaged in any sustainability-related activities compared with the world average. Sustainability was cited as a challenge by only 11 percent of the respondents from the Americas.
