Data skills gaps are expounding into productivity gaps across industries, with workers on average losing 25 days of productivity a year due to inefficient completion of data tasks.

This is according to a new report from Mutliverse Skills, which found that employees on average spend 14.31 hours a week on data tasks, equivalent to 36% of their total working week.

Data skills are continually more and more vital as digital transformation takes hold across industries, but employees are lacking even the most basic of digital skills.

According to the report, over half of workers (57%) have no or only basic Excel skills. Over half (53%) lack the ability to make data analysis more efficient or use automation processes (49%).

More advanced skills are also lacking – 55% have no skills in Tableau, and 86% have no skills in Python.

While it may not be necessary for every employee to have even a basic understanding of Python, other holistic data skills are also missing.

Predictive data analysis, modelling and forecasting (49%), analysing data to make decisions (46%) and visualising and presenting data (46%) are all key skills missing by a large proportion of employees.

Effectively handling data is essential for business prospects, but a lack of efficiency can waste precious time for employees spending hours on data handling rather than other aspects of their job.

Employees working in manufacturing spend about three hours a day working on data, but more than an hour of that is spent inefficiently.

Those in education spend about 38% of their time working with data unproductively. About 34% of the time healthcare workers spend working with data is unproductive – that means of the 20 hours a week they spend working with data, nearly seven of those hours are wasted.

Further, about 68% of those working at not-for-profits have only basic Excel skills or none at all – severely limiting their data analysis capabilities.

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Commenting on the findings, Euan Blair, CEO at Multiverse said: “The lack of data skills is holding businesses back, and it is holding economies back. Workers are wasting hundreds of hours a year because they lack the skills to handle data effectively – that loss is coupled with the faulty decision-making and opportunity cost of poor data use.”

Despite these shortfalls, 90% of employees on average across different industries want to improve their data skills, the survey found.

“Companies have spent billions on software, but hardly anything on the skills needed to get the most from that software,” Blair said, elucidating on the pattern of companies investing in AI, without complimenting this with appropriate investment in skills.