What is Scalability Exercise featuring in Dell employees’ career conversations?

As businesses realign with the business models and priorities, employees too have to identify their potential to scale. As the scope of a role is constantly changing, an employee’s potential relating to future business objectives come into question. Ritu Rakhra, Regional HR Head – India, Dell Technologies talks about a pivotal marker called Scalability Exercise that helps identify the employees with potential  to adapt to change and scale. She throws a light on the task of talent transformation. Rakhra also talks about the DeepTech skill that Dell accounts for and changing strategies to stay ahead of the hiring game.

How is Dell Technologies handling the task of talent transformation?

Dell Technologies has always considered itself to be a “People First” organization. We also pride ourselves in bringing transformation solutions to our customers across the industries. But there’s an additional transformation that underpins all of them: ‘people transformation’. As people and team members, we have to fully embrace change. It’s the best way to stay ahead and serve customers better.

One such initiative which identifies employees who have potential to scale is ‘Scalability Exercise’. This helps in identifying employees considering their ability, agility, and capability to increase scope of their roles. It also involves considering the individual’s leadership capabilities. Scalability provides an opportunity to reflect on team members’ potential as it relates to current and future business objectives, provides opportunity to develop our team members for future roles or to enhance career conversations and moments of coaching, and thereby improving key talent retention as a result.

What about the challenges in skilling and reskilling?

Dell Technologies’ ‘Skills Assessment’ exercise provides employees with the opportunity to assess their proficiency against key skills, to opt for upskilling. This also helps in starting a conversation with their leaders to align on what their strengths are and where they should focus for development. Employees can assess themselves against our ‘Culture Code Values’ and ‘Leadership Principles’ or the ‘Culture Code Core Skills’ in addition to any functional or technical skills that have been identified for them.

At Dell we also focus on identifying critical business priorities and aligning our key talent to these priorities. This is being done across the organization for all employees including recent graduate hires as well as leaders. We have developed programs like Full Stack Developer Program - a tech upskilling exercise to enable employees to become end-to-end experts across the software lifecycle. It even provides opportunity to non-software developers to reskill as core developers. Additionally, we have initiatives like Opportunity Marketplace, focusing on ‘On-the-Job’ competency development for all our employees.

How have issues of hiring and attrition changed during the pandemic? How are you changing strategies?

From a hiring perspective, our process and strategy are focused on technology enabled remote hiring through virtual interviews and onboardings. Location is no longer a constraint in the hybrid / remote world which has helped expand our available talent pool. We continue to build and emphasize on our culture, flexibility & work-life balance initiatives.

During the pandemic, we also focused on wellness, work-life balance campaigns, increased employee engagement through Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), new ways of working and business continuity. We also developed a data-based approach to provide insights on the organization’s health to our people leaders. This leader dashboard offers analytics and insights in real time to help them make decisions on hiring/retention strategies, current and future capabilities of talent etc.

What new kinds of job roles and opportunities are coming up?

We will see more opportunities arising in the below areas:

• Infrastructure Technical Support
• Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
• Edge & Quantum Computing
• Virtual & Augmented Reality
• Blockchain
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• 5G
• Cyber Security