A new digital divide threatening resilience: exploring the need for educational, firm-based, and societal investments in ICT human capital

The knowledge, skills, and abilities that human capital offers create tangible and intangible assets that equip organizations to thrive. In particular, in today’s Industry 4.0 environment, training, recruiting, and retaining highly qualified ICT-ready professionals remains a problem for many organizations including educational, governmental, healthcare, and business organizations. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the importance of digital assets to our economies, and it is also demonstrating that there is potentially a new digital divide with even worse implications for companies, economies, and society, which is threatening the resilience of business, governance, and society. In this paper, we respond to the question “how can we develop ICT human capital in our global economy in an equitable, inclusive, and purposeful manner such that not organizations thrive, but also to promote social justice and equity in our global economy?”