The Capability Gap This week at The RPA Academy we had a very interesting meeting with a potential client regarding their future goals. It was an exciting discussion from a large business with a bold vision. So far so good... By definition "A bold vision" should be extremely challenging and likely beyond the current capabilities of the organization. If it's not these things, then it's also neither bold nor a particularly great vision! There is always going to be some capability gap between what you have today and what you will need in the future. We're still on track... But now the rubber hi ..read more

Less Than 1 in 10 of you have this risk covered! Usual caveats about not being a research house… But our Self-Test RPA Audit is throwing up big issues (and some reassuring factors too). You’d certainly be sacked if you treated your IT infrastructure the same way you are looking at people. Over the last few weeks we’ve been following the theme “RPA and people risk”. The message is simple. The C-suite has high expectations. The technology has huge opportunities. The vision can be very clear. However, someone at the coal face actually has to do the hard work. In a market where there is an unde ..read more

At home the use of AI is ubiquitous; it is in your smartphone, your choice of TV programming, your online shopping experience and all of your interactions with Alexa or Siri. And this is to name but a few. The same is not true in business, and some of this is often because of old misconceptions, and you can't blame people for not keeping up when the market has advanced at such a terrific pace. It really wasn't that long ago that you needed deep pockets, a shed load of data and access to data scientists to have any chance of ..read more

Of course, we wall want more pay. We are all underpaid and deserve 250% salary increases. Today… Backdated, 3 years. But what is next in our wish list? What will keep us with our current employer or project longer? Employers, here is what your employees want. This is a tight labour market - in all technologies, not just RPA. Employees have lots of options. Realistically, most of your teams do want to stay with you, so you’re in a good position, if you can listen. In order of priority, here are the results: More pay More training Better leadership Listen to us Have a good (and clea ..read more

Again - we are not a research house. But each week, these simple questions throw up some fascinating insights. Here are the four %ages to wake you up: 55% have moved jobs or project (for freelancers) in the last 12 months 65% intend to move jobs or project in the next 12 months. Last time they moved, 67% got up to 20% increase in compensation Next time, more than 50% expect to get a 20+% pay increase. What does this mean for employers…? The RPA jobs market is going to get more fluid, not less fluid You need to be prepared. To keep talent means paying more. To attract talent means paying mo ..read more

Gartners' Magic Quadrant Last week Gartner released their Magic Quadrant for RPA and those vendors happy with the findings went crazy to celebrate the recognition of their success. While others quietly shuffled it under the carpet, hoping no one would notice. If you'd like to read the full report it can be downloaded from Blue Prism on this link. The Magic Quadrant is your typical four-box grid, the x-axis tracking 'completeness of vision' and the y-axis 'ability to execute.' It's the y-axis that really sorts the wheat from the chaff, capabilities are no good if they are difficult to deliver ..read more

Regular readers of my weekly newsletter will recognise that this is a topic I've discussed before. On our first outing, I concluded that both RPA and Low Code had its own place in a complementary way: Low-Code: Collaborator or Challenger for the RPA Crown? Last week, I was speaking at a UK Mendix Event (Mendix on Tour) on the topic of Delivering Results with the AI Ecosystem. I enjoy discussing both principles and practice, and on this occasion, I was fortunate enough to share the stage with Simon Black, Mendix Guru, Evangelist and a kid in a candy shop when it comes to the opportunities affor ..read more

Last week the RPA Academy interviewed Harrison Goode, co-founder of Edge Tech Headhunters where we discussed the state of the robot job market. See the full video here There were some terrific questions from the audience, including which products are most in-demand, where are the most opportunities and which industries have the greatest levels of adoption (see the webinar here). Then came the question... "There are talks that RPA is dying... How many years you see RPA going strong?" Oh dear, I love HfS but their 'RPA is dead' story simply refuses to die. Ironic really, especially since the ..read more

We often get the question, "why do you sell RPA training when you can get it all for free?" Well, let me debunk of few of the myths behind that statement now! For starters, you can't get it all for free. You can only get some knowledge for free though on-demand videos. We occasionally sell courses in this format ourselves, but it's not our preferred approach and it doesn't suit everyones training style. The rigid structure and forced learning paths are not the most effective use of time, the materials can age quickly and for many platforms there is a lot of poor quality material out there. The ..read more

As a pure-play training/knowledge organization, running since 2017, we work online and onsite across the globe.  This gives us a very unusual perspective of the RPA market.  What we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks has been highly revealing about exactly how much penetration RPA has had in to organizations. And the answer is “not much”! But that is all starting to change. Here’s what we’ve seen, just in the last few weeks. You hear vague numbers about the number of clients each RPA platform has. But that means nothing really. You can’t see from public data exactly how many bots RPA-users re ..read more