5/25/2019 Surviving the Skills Economy

Surviving the Skills Economy

By Archana Jerath
June 11, 2018

Today, technologies such as Arti cial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are driving industries across the world. The advent of new
age technology is also causing disruption on the job landscape and replacing traditional roles with innovative roles. The expectations of
employees from their employers have undergone a dramatic shift, driving CHROs to rethink their talent management strategies. In order for
organizations to survive, sustain and thrive, there is a huge onus on HR to prepare their workforce for the 'new normal.' This calls for
embracing a people-focused approach that can enable talent to develop skills and become major di erentiators for their organizations.

To better understand the future of work in the changing environment and how HR can leverage technology to sail through the skills
economy, a thought-provoking session was conducted at the fourth edition of SHRM HR Technology Conference 2018 held in Hyderabad
on 26th and 27th April. The panel comprised of Sunil Gupta, Regional Sales Manager, Cornerstone On Demand India; Animesh Kumar,
Advisor Digital Transformation, People O ce, Future Group; Latesh Bellaney, Global HR Shared Services Leader, Genpact, VP - HR,
Genpact; and Alok Narain, EVP HR, Quatrro Global Services.

Disruption was Expected but not its Speed and Complexity

Sunil began the discussion by highlighting that disruption caused by technology is not new but the pace at it which it is progressing and
complexities that it brings along was not expected by the industry.

He quoted a report by Human Capital Institute according to which 50 percent of top 500 companies will disappear or get acquired if they
do not develop (employee) skills required to manoeuvre around disruption.A few companies have already shifted gears in the new
direction and are creating innovative job titles that never existed before. For example, Google has openings for a culinary product
developer, the automobile industry is looking for document package engineers and mobile companies have a requirement for camera
algorithm engineers.

Another challenge that lies ahead for the companies in the wake of disruption is managing employee expectations. The new-age
employees are no longer interested in following a traditional career path or train for an existing job. They rather want to learn continuously,
develop skills for potential jobs and work in transparent o ce culture. Hence, the employee engagement is emerging to becoming more
contextual in nature. The manner in which the companies can o er personalized and meaningful engagement along with a holistic,
collaborative experience to its employee can make all the di erence in the next ve years.

Skills That Organizations Desire in Candidates in the Age of Technology

The only way to face the curve balls thrown by technology is to create pools of employees with the requisite skills. But, what are these
skills?

Animesh Kumar states that collaboration and learning agility are the two most important skills to survive in the skills economy. In the past
few years, the world has witnessed two major trends - increase in the specialization of tasks and disaggregation of the value chain. In the
traditional value chain model, only a handful of people supervised the beginning to end of the chain. Today, businesses have crossed the

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geographical barriers to create extended value chains and include multiple layers of processes requiring specialized teams to execute
them.

Hence, collaboration - the ability to work with people whom you haven't met, don't know and will never get to speak within the value chain,
is a crucial skill requirement. At the same time, learning agility - the ability and willingness to learn in new situations, is another key skill in
demand due to the pace of change.

As per Latesh Bellaney apart from collaboration and learning agility, others employee skills that companies desire today are courage,
curiosity, humility and innovation. The candidate's educational degree would matter, but workplace learning and adaptability to situations

will matter even more.

Alok Narain drew attention towards a point that is of great consequence but often overlooked. In his opinion, skills economy is just not
about employers or employees, it is about the survival of the entire ecosystem and hence, it should be taken seriously. He also agreed that
while collaboration must happen, it should happen in a way that it is meant to happen without the knowledge of collaborators. Basically,
collaboration should be embedded as 'normal' in the company culture. Other necessary skills on Alok's list were critical thinking, creativity
and learnability.

Talent Management Technology is Critical to Skills Economy

Technology has posed challenges for organizations. Surprisingly, technology is also the solution. Social, cloud, analytics and mobile-based
technologies are enabling HR to power talent management strategy and attract, develop and retain employees. Unfortunately, the adoption
of these technologies is still slow. A Bersin by Deloitte Research report titled 'High-Impact Talent Management: Talent Management
Maturity in India (http://www.bersin.com/Practice/Detail.aspx?id=19786)' states that while the Indian talent management scenario is
changing aggressively, 79 percent of the companies have low talent management maturity levels. This clearly indicates that there is an
urgent requirement for the Indian companies to embrace talent management technology if they want to survive the skills economy.

When being asked how their companies are leveraging talent management technology, the panelists presented useful insights.

Taking an example of his organization Quatrro Global Services, Alok said their collaboration platform makes it possible for every employee
to access resources and tools created and generated by users. The platform has enabled the company to keep the individuals at the core
of ecosystem. It helps its employees to share the learning space. The company follows an inverted pyramid system where the HR does not
assess the training needs; rather the learning is driven by performance consulting approach.

Latesh shared that deployment digitized tools such as a self-service portal and chat bots has helped his organization Genpact considerably
in talent management.

Animesh talked about how his organization, Future Group is using technology to integrate multiple sources of learning into personalized,
measurable and trackable content. This approach has helped them to reduce the time lag between learning need and delivery; o er real-
time and on-the-job learning to employees; and prevent the loss of learning capability, time and opportunity.

In the audience poll conducted during the session, 100 percent of participants agreed that skills are the new currency while 75 percent
agreed that learning agility is an important new-age skill.

Key Takeaways from the Session

Skills are the new currency of digital age.

It is time to change transaction-based strategy to people-centric approach.
The organizations are shifting from human capital management to human potential management.
The most important skills to survive the skills economy are collaboration and learning agility.
Generic and repetitive roles will become extinct, only innovative roles will stay.

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The con dence level of deploying AI and ML solutions in the organizations is low during the initial phase. Depending on their
performance and company's requirements, they may need to be tweaked or re-deployed from scratch. It may be some time before
they yield the results.
Organizations need to create a menu of skills and let employees choose the skill they want to learn. The focus should be bridging
the learning gap and not xing the assessment side of the issue.
The velocity of change is crumbling the importance of work experience and may make it irrelevant in the long run.

It clearly emerged from the panel discussion that technology will continue to disrupt the industry and the only way to survive is to develop
new-age skills in employees.

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