Modern Managers in Gig Economies: Competencies, Personality and their Effect on Manager Education in the Digital Era

Social and economic aspects of life of society have been impacted by digital technologies; a process, which has significantly accelerated with the new millennium. Making effective business decisions in the contemporary world of evolving digital solutions without considering digital information and sources is hardly productive. This has triggered a deep socio-economic transformation across various aspects of life of society, including a diverse range of business sectors and the emergence of the gig economy and gig workforce, which has been defined by Wood et al. (2019) as people who offer their services through mobile applications. This results in the need of more rigid management systems. Furthermore, the EU vision of competitiveness of EU economies is associated with the transformation of markets and the acquisition of digital skills by the EU workforce. However, there is a lack of management professionals with digital skills capable of fluent use of digital technologies and their promotion in their teams. Business and management programs at universities are structural units that can offer the development of such skills. The key goal of this research paper is to identify manager digital competencies that are currently in demand and to determine if entrepreneurial skills and knowledge of personality can assist in the development of digital skills in order to provide more effective educational approaches to support the management needs in the era of digital transformation. In order to attain the goal, literature review and the survey of senior managers of Latvian enterprises were conducted. Latvia was chosen because Latvia has low indicators of integrating digital technologies into the economy. The outcome of the research is the proposal of conceptual aspects of enhancing students’ digital, entrepreneurial and psychological skills in order to provide more effective educational approaches to support the management needs in the era of digital transformation and the digital quotient having been added to one of the key coefficients of people’s abilities.