Achieving Rapid Organisational Transformation With Reskilling

All you need is a right approach

The beginning of this year saw a lot of debate on automation in enterprises & its consequences. Against this backdrop, organizations are struggling to come up with transformation strategies that take into account these different perspectives on how best to achieve human resource & organizational development in a technologically driven climate. But as a handful of top organizations are discovering today, it is possible to achieve big gains in productivity & growth with the right approach.

 

And reskilling & upskilling for effective employee engagement may hold the key to this strategy. With a sound retaining strategy, businesses can completely transform into a leaner, more profitable model in less than 2 years.

To make the case for reskilling, let’s first understand what employee engagement is and why organizations should make it their focal point. In simple terms, employee engagement is a workplace approach that focuses on providing a conducive workplace culture that result in increased employee commitment to the organization’s goals. It is basically a give and take approach - satisfies employees & keep them happy. In return, the organization is rewarded with an engaged, motivated workforce actively contributing to its growth. This year’s Deloitte Global Human Capital report pointed to a new social contract that is emerging between an employee and employer. Stability & long-term commitment are a thing of the past; organizations today are witnessing an increased job hopping tendency among employees.
 
This tendency has forced an organization to buckle up and introduce measures to retain their employees. One of the ways in which they are accomplishing this is with reskilling and/or upskilling. The principle behind this is simple: when an organization displays their willingness to invest in an employee, it reinforces the latter’s feeling of importance to the organization’s goals.

Another aspect of an effective organizational transformation strategy is the importance placed on employees’ ‘digital skills’. At the NASSCOM India Leadership forum last year, the importance of retraining the approximately 3.9 million people working in the IT sector to stay relevant in the digital economy was emphasized time and again. A McKinsey report on human capital in 2017 reinforces this view, going so far as to state that reskilling is the need of the hour. The digital skill gap is a very real problem that needs to be addressed quickly if organizations are to maintain profitability in an ultra-competitive market.
 
With technology accelerating at a rapid pace, no new tool or innovation stays novel for long. However, very few organizations have employees who are capable of responding to this constant change in tech. Digitally proficient employees are so scarce that re-training & upskilling existing employees have taken priority over investing in new hires.

When it comes to employee training, there’s no question that outsourcing your programs to leading training providers is the way to go. Prohibitive costs of maintaining an in-house training department with instructional designers, SMEs, editors and project managers is a major reason for this. In addition, transient and inconsistent training requirements further complicate the situation. According to a LinkedIn survey,  LinkedIn and Whiteboard Advisors 2017, 71% of the L&D experts polled believed that partnering with external training providers is a way to efficiently tackle skill gap.
 
With the renewed focus on digital skills, leading training providers offer enterprise enablement training programs in areas such as machine learning, DevOps, Internet Of Things (IoT), Big data & Analytics and other emerging technologies. A hybrid delivery model with flexible modes of learning and e-learning content to supplant classroom-learning make for a seamless learning experience, improving learning outcomes significantly.
 
To sum up, organizations can make landfall gains & achieve business transformation for the digital economy in as little as 2 years - even in today’s unstable technology environment. But this requires a sound human capital development strategy with a focus on -