We now live in a hyper-connected world with hyper-connected people. We can call people, email them, send a tweet, get a message on Instagram, reply on Facebook and it goes on and on.

Billions of people are connected worldwide and businesses need to be on all these platforms as well. They not only need to communicate with customers in this way, but also hire staffs who are able to manage those communications.

In this article, we're going to discuss the impact of technology and how it has transformed the word of business.

Customer expectations

When you book something on amazon, you're immediately checking your email. If it doesn't come through within a few minutes, you think something's wrong.

That expectation will be there when you're dealing with any other business as well. That expectation of technology is just becoming ingrained in the customer.

In the past, communicating with banks was very inflexible. You could only go in between certain times, and they'd always shut for lunch. It was all on their terms.

But now with online banking, it's 24 hours a day, plus they have scores of data analysts and analyzing what they should do next. This has completely changed the banking sector.

Government policy

In 2012, Germany rolled out the "Industry 4.0" or "Fewer Point Null" as they call it. That was what they viewed as the fourth industrial revolution.

What it meant was the government was going to give incentives to manufacturers to digitize and become more technologically savvy. The reason they did this was they saw that China and Asia at large, was rising in manufacturing.

The Germans didn't want to lower the wages of their workers. They didn't want to compete the way China was competing which is in low wages and lots of workers. They wanted to compete through efficiency, so they rolled out this policy where they were giving breaks to companies who would implement the internet of things.

4.0 mean the rips of industrial evolution. It started in Yorkshire and England with steam power, we later got into mass production, then in the 80s we had electronics.

Now we're getting into connected machines talking to each other and that's what the Germans were calling industry 4.0. That policy generated many new jobs and changed the way manufacturers were working. What German factories are now using is all about;

Data analytics

Smart devices connectivity

Embedded chips

Robots

3d printing.

Let's look at retail as an example. If you remember the 90s, they used to compete on price all the time. It was possible to go into a supermarket and get five cents paid to you to get a can of baked beans. This is because what they were lowering the price to try and get customers.

This was a no way to compete because it's a race to the bottom and the companies are losing money. The way they compete nowadays is on technology.

They have the apps and are giving you offers through it. They also have smart shelves. You might not know this, but in the shelves in supermarkets all have sensors on them telling someone in the back when to restock them.

Companies need data analysts to manage all of this. They need web developers to create these apps and software testers to make sure it's all working.

These were jobs that just weren't in retail 10 years ago. Companies need skills to keep up. The new jobs have been created because they need to digitize to engage with customers and take advantage of government regulations.

They need either staff who can do these skills or to upskill people in their own company.

Let's look at the skills gap. If we look at data analytics for example; IBM this year have said that over the last three years, ads for data analysts' jobs have gone up by 28% in the western world.

LinkedIn, a website which a lot of people use, did a survey and data and analytics jobs came out third in the top 10 jobs emerging at the moment.

That sounds great, but the European Commission has estimated that they'll be looking at 484,000 positions in data analytics unfilled. That means there'll be job adverts in Europe for these roles. But they don't have enough data analysts or trained people to fill them.

We're connected on many levels with many things and people. This has changed the world of work as people's view of technology has moved on.

Companies therefore need to react and be digital. They have to manage these various digital channels by storing and analyzing data and their services.