Are job transitions across industries real??? How to navigate complex talent challenges?
Prashant Dhume
Certified Independent Director, specializing in ERM, IT Strategy, Cyber Security, and Managed Services. Ex-Accenture Senior Managing Director
What are the talent strategy hurdles?
There have been a few articles published recently related to the workforce trends, and the rise of job transitions across industries in particular. These articles provide insights with findings pointing to the transition of jobs being more visible from Tech to non-Tech sectors, and from sectors like Consumer Goods, Wholesale, Entertainment to Manufacturing, Tech, Professional Services. The emphasis is on the transferable skills, and how the changing business landscape is making enterprises rethink who they are hiring.
Varied trends will emerge related to job rotation, hiring, and attrition. The current optics point to relatively higher attrition in select industries. In addition, the subdued demand in pockets is resulting in lower uptake of graduates. Few of these patterns are cyclical in nature, and could change if the demand situation changes.
There is a merit for organisations to revisit how they source, and develop talent. The conventional approach of hiring, Learning & Development (L&D) is getting re-visited. The pace of change will require enterprises to infuse multi-disciplinary teams, refine skills, to remain competitive. The hard separation of skills across industries is getting blurred. This will get need to get mirrored in the L&D area with focus on holistic education.
Let us take a peek at talent sourcing through different lens (covering formal workforce):
What is driving these changes in talent sourcing?
The Indian economy has grown at a consistent clip in the past few years. This is driven by huge push for labour led, high end manufacturing, deep investments in physical, digital infrastructure across industries, and services. The gap between demand, and supply is getting acute with employment distributed across industries, urban, and rural sectors.
Many if not all organisations are on the path to be digital organisations.? There is an acceleration in digital transformation with digital technologies & strategies integrated across many aspects of business, government, and social sectors. This is driving the need for multi disciplinary talent, and teams with ‘Adaptability’ becoming a key differentiator.
How are organisations responding to this change?
The change in the business climate in the past few years has resulted in a shift from conventional approach to source formal workforce talent. The shift is from sourcing talent with academic qualifications, industry experience to talent with diverse competencies, strong communication ability, working with diverse teams, customer facing, and problem solving skills. The solid lines of industry alignment has started to get blurred for certain skills. Sourcing talent across industries has been adopted before, but not at a wider scale.
In addition the demand growth has been distributed across urban, rural sectors, and the war for talent is not restricted to large corporations. The other pattern emerging is that the Tech Services firms have reduced the hiring of graduates due to lower demand than anticipated. Once growth revives, the younger employees headcount could change.
An unknown at this stage is the push by organisations to get on the Gen.AI bandwagon, and get large part of their workforce AI trained. Enterprises are hiring AI experts, and AI talent previously recruited by Tech giants is getting more distributed.
How are organisations responding to this change?
The change in the business climate in the past few years has resulted in a shift from conventional approach to source formal workforce talent. The shift is from sourcing talent with academic qualifications, experience in an industry to talent with diverse competencies, strong communication ability, working with, and leading diverse teams, customer facing, and problem solving skills. The solid lines of industry alignment has started to get blurred for certain skills. Sourcing talent across industries has been adopted before, but not broad based, nor at a wider scale.
In addition the demand growth has been distributed across urban, rural sectors, and the war for talent is not restricted to large corporations. The other pattern emerging is that the Tech firms have reduced the hiring of graduates due to lower demand than anticipated. Once growth revives, the younger employees headcount could change.
An unknown at this stage is the push by organisations to get on the Gen.AI bandwagon, and get large part of their workforce AI trained. Enterprises are hiring AI experts, and AI talent previously recruited by Tech giants is getting more distributed.
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What are the solutions to build talent for the future to deliver sustainable growth?
Organisations need to rethink on the approach to acquire, develop, and retain talent. The conventional approach to source talent based on academic qualifications will need to be revisited, and enterprises are addressing these through below pillars:
First pillar: Ascertain the talent strategy with blend of buy vs build, insource vs outsource vs collaboration with ecosystem, and academia. Be flexible to refine this sourcing mix, as demand situation changes, and AI landscape evolves. Acquiring talent may have worked in the past, it may not be a full proof approach to safe-guard against the challenges of attrition, attracting skilled talent. Refining this blend of sourcing talent will be an ongoing process.
Second pillar:? Select the talent source to build the talent pipeline, plan, implement the optimal talent acquisition strategies. These would cover campus recruitment, skilled talent from diverse industries, contract hiring, internships. Organisations will need a multi-disciplinary team with foundation skills, and cognitive capabilities. This will include a talent pool with strong communication ability, problem solving skills, empathy quotient, customer engagement, ability to work with diverse teams. Adaptability to work with culturally diverse teams, neurodiverse talent, within, outside organizations would become a key trait, and differentiator.
As the Gen.AI landscape evolves, there will be a demand for AI experts who understand, build cutting-edge AI models plus demand for those who can adopt AI tools.
Third Pillar: Invest in continuous L&D, and rework the metrics to measure L&D impact. Adaptability to Learn, un-Learn, and Re-Learn are crucial elements to bridge the skills gap. Learning will be a blend of structured methods (curriculum led, classroom, online), collaborative learning, LLM reinforcement, and social learning. All the organisation staff, functions, will need to be aligned on purpose, empathy, and understanding to adopt AI tools to deliver improved outcomes.
Certifications, Functional & Tech Quotient, Productivity, CoPQ, trainings attended, training hours completed are amongst the ways to measure the progress of L&D. What is missing is ways to measure the softer attributes (Adaptability, Resourcefulness, Empathy …). Explore ways to introduce ‘Adaptability’ measures, and impact on CX, EX, and integrate the same in the overall metrics.
Establish, encourage a learning culture within the organisation. In addition, collaborate with ecosystem partners, academia, and industry associations.
Synopsis, Key takeaways:
This is a vital moment for the industries with significant growth, digital transformation, and changing economic landscape. The workforce of tomorrow will be more multi-disciplinary, distinguished not just by qualifications but by a rainbow of competencies with foundation, and cognitive abilities. India’s NEP 2020 policy echoes the same in their principles. Enterprises, job seekers, academia need to leverage this opportunity, and rework the conventional approach of talent acquisition, and development.
References: (a) LinkedIn Workforce Report by Abhiraj Ganguli (Changing Lanes: The rise of job transitions across industries) (b) TOI article by Ravi Venkatesan (Elite mindset is not going to solve jobs issue)