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Introduction
Digital transformation has initiated a radical change of societies and the business world (George, 2020). Virtually all business sectors and corporate functions have been affected by its disruptive nature (Matzler et al., 2018), and we can observe a profound change from traditional business models to digital or hybrid ones. Moreover, we witnessed that Big Tech companies such as Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook and so forth have obtained an unprecedented influence and power. Digital transformation will continue to change organizations, processes and technologies within a business firm context. Skills and competencies of employees can be considered as a prerequisite for a successful digital transformation (Peter et al., 2020; Vial, 2019) and the resistance of employees might be considered as a major barrier for the implementation of digital technologies (Vial, 2019). Based on a comprehensive review of the literature, Nadkarni and Prügl (2020) argue that the transformation of digital skills of employees has been largely neglected by current research.
Morakanyane et al. (2017) indicate that especially operational processes are affected by digital transformation (Gimpel et al., 2018) and robotic process automation (RPA), as a key technology with regard to administrative processes, plays a major role in these developments (Anagnoste, 2017; Deloitte, 2018; Osmundsen et al., 2019; RolandBerger, 2018). Given the above identified neglection of skills and competencies in research, this paper uses RPA as a context to address this issue.
The overall research objective of this study is to analyze required skills and competencies for digital transformation, using the context of RPA as an example. To address this objective, a literature review as well as an empirical study using qualitative data from job advertisements is conducted. This paper contributes to knowledge by providing empirical findings and adding a novel perspective to the ongoing discussion of digital skills, employment effects and reskilling demands of the existing workforce initiated by recent technological developments with regard to RPA in the overall context of digital transformation.
The paper is structured as follows. The following literature review section discusses the theoretical lens applied in this research and provides contextual background on the phenomena of digital transformation and RPA. Moreover, the authors proceed with a concise discussion of prior seminal work regarding required knowledge and competencies in the context...