Meta-skills: It’s time to think about them

Sameer Bendre, Chief People Officer, Persistent Systems Ltd gives a peek into how proactivity, granularity, and scalability help in matching the challenges of the new world. He also talks about the need to pay attention to deployability, employee experience, and employee lifecycle. We are confronting digital transformation of not just industries but talent as well, he stresses.

The digital transformation of talent…

The market has witnessed remarkable growth amidst emerging demand and it is likely to stay as robust. Capturing the demand took no time to whip out the greatest challenge i.e. talent management, compelling everyone to strategize differently; the increasing demand has manifested into greater complexity of IT systems and surges in demand for agile resources with relevant skills in the new emerging technologies. So, we are not talking of only digital transformation in processes, functions, and industries but also the digital transformation of talent.

Skill gaps are significant, and we have tried decoding them in our own way. We have been looking at ways to polish, and proactively up-skill, our existing workforce with strong plans to retain them as well. We have tried identifying the tech skills at a granular level and developed a clear view of the present and upcoming talent needs. We have scaled our strategic focus and investments in strengthening the overall learning experience for our employees. The key is to train and upskill employees in critical skills that will not only open up multiple opportunities for business growth but also offer upgraded career avenues for employees.

The Skilling initiative needs to be re-engineered with a greater focus on Deep Tech

Up-skilling and re-skilling form the dire need of the hour. With the widening of skill gaps, it is essential to encourage and help your employees gather skills and brace up for a super competitive business world out there. It is important to inspire the workforce to strengthen core skills and at the same time make systematic and continuous attempts to upgrade additional critical skills. We also need to educate them on how it would also reward employees for keeping pace and agility to acquire critical and high-demand skills.

The skilling initiative needs to be re-engineered with a greater focus on deep tech skills, learning new and emerging technologies with the right mix of meta-skills as well. Technology disruption stresses the need to make your business future-proof with the supply of relevant skilled talent.

There are some even more pertinent questions like – What are the most important skills to be focused on? Which of these skills will be difficult to teach at scale? How many of these can be self-studied or taught effectively via online channels?

A new and diverse educational ecosystem partnered with industry-relevant skills intervention programs can go a long way in infusing the right-skilled fresher talent and this is what the industry players and academia should collaborate on, and come forward with.

Focus on the entire employee lifecycle…

It is for everyone to witness, how the demand for technology has accentuated; at the same time, the supply-side concerns are no less known. Attrition has become a norm with the creation of multiple opportunities not only in the IT industry but also with the explosion of startups and increasing crossroads for digital adoption across industries; employees now have options outside the industry like never before. In these times, retaining talent is equally important as finding top talent. We are ensuring that our existing workforce is valued and there are no disparities when compared with lateral hires. As a crucial step in this direction, we are working on offering a renewed employee experience with a focus on the entire employee lifecycle that ranges from hiring, and recruitment to onboarding and career development to rewards and recognition for exemplary performance and long service.

Also hiring at scale is on our list of non-stop activities with a radical shift towards freshers’ hiring. Fresh talent management is two-fold as we see. First, campus hiring, boot camps, and internship programs for IT and CS engineers have been there and now we are working on building more robust programs in collaboration with universities and colleges to make freshers industry-ready and shorten the deployability-turnaround. Second is the focus on providing opportunities to adaptable learners by enabling non-technical, non-engineering graduates through our ‘hire and train’ model.

On upcoming job opportunities…

Cyber security, DevOps, cloud computing, AI & Machine Learning, and Data analysis are some of the most trending skills that have seen a rising count of opportunities. We see that there is good demand for platform development, and digital automated smart services with integrated data analytics. Job opportunities in allied profiles are also witnessing an up-end. Considerable opportunities have emerged in fields like Business development, PMO, workforce transformation, hiring and talent acquisition, tech training and coaching, data and people analytics, digitalization of internal processes including enabling functions like Finance, HR, Risk, and Operations.

About the issues of moonlighting…

Moonlighting or proxy attendance for tests/interviews has emerged as a concern. We haven’t had it all spotless for the last two years with remote setup, but a strong governance framework and the right checks and balances at varying levels in our organization have enabled us to keep such cases to negligible. A thorough background verification process for employees on-boarded, varied employee and team engagement mechanisms and analytics to assess employee productivity are some knacks that have helped a great deal. Moreover, our multi-leveled interview processes and assessments are systematically designed with preset skill mapping and proctoring that efficiently assess the capabilities of potential candidates with the desired level of authenticity.

By Pratima Harigunani

pratimah@cybermedia.co.in