A “Human” Differentiation in the age of automation - A note to leadership in the enterprise

This article is in continuation of my earlier post, where I highlighted the two skills which will make you irreplaceable & indispensable in the age of Automation & AI. You can read about the first skill here. I will write my views about the second skill in some time.

I thought about writing this note to leadership in large-scale enterprise because based upon my interaction with the leaders as well as employees, I felt a lot of grey areas in which the employee re-skilling and up-skilling are carried out in them

One size doesn’t fit all

There are two major categories of employees in the enterprises – new graduates (experience typically varies from 0-5 years) and Existing employees (5+ years of experience)

Generally, the way re-skilling trainings are rolled-out are same for both the categories of employees. The justification for this is uncertainty about rate of change of technology - when technology changes so quickly, then how can we customize the trainings so fast, and, of course, the costs associated with re-skilling.

However, executives need to plan that the focus of training to workforce entering the enterprise is more technical, whereas the training for the existing employees is either more role-specific or train-the-trainer types. This is evident from this report which states that there is a fundamental disconnect between how employers feel they are being reskilled vs how employees feel they are reskilled. The trust which executives have on their reskilling initiatives is far more than the value employees feel from such activities.

We need to bridge this disconnect.

And the solution to this problem is very elementary, as can be leveraged from the methods of delivering any reskilling programs – train the employees in a manner that they see value, get enough projects to test the waters, and feel that these programs help them with career growth (rather than fear of losing their jobs!)

Executives need to share the responsibility in helping employees to learn & adopt new skills. They can begin by communicating the need for reskilling, helping the employees to identify his/her interest areas, enterprise priorities, and discuss how can the employee add more value, and help them get trained through customized & structured learning paths. The employee should also get the visibility on how his/her new acquired knowledge will be leveraged in the future, so that the fear of becoming replicable goes, and the conviction is built right from the beginning.

From numerous research (one here), we find that employees are actually aware of Digital, AI & automation, and want to learn it. It’s only the enterprises which are unable to keep-pace with the employees demand for learning esp. AI.