Digital Adda-Carrots and More Carrots & No Stick Policy to Up/Re-Skill Employees
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
The Pandemic and resultant technology adoption across domains such as cloud computing and AI/ML is driving the demand for digital talent across industries. Companies are aiming to meet this skyrocketing demand for digital talent by increasing fresher hiring & expanding the base to include non-engineering talent. Companies are simultaneously re-/up-skilling talent for relevant technologies or as they say enabling an internal marketplace.
Where India Stands
According to nasscom Strategic Review 2022, FY2022 is expected to be a breakthrough year for India’s technology industry – total industry revenue is set to reach ~$227 billion in FY2022 (15.5% y-o-y growth). The industry crossed $100 bn and has nearly doubled this within 10 years.
Digital revenue share stood at 30-32%, recording an incremental revenue of $13 bn in FY2022E.With 1 out of 3 employees already digitally skilled, the digital tech talent pool is at 1.6 million, growing at a CAGR of 25%. With massive focus on reskilling and upskilling, the Indian tech industry reskilled approximately 280k employees in FY2022.
Managing employee motivation
The million-dollar question is how to motivate employees. If an employee knows that he can earn incentives and work on other projects which will bring in extra money, it always works. Realizing that carrots and more carrots will work and sticks no longer apply, companies have introduced several initiatives.
In a round table conversation, Thirumala Arohi, Head of Education, Training and Assistance Infosys, explained that at Infosys, individuals who work on projects after learning new skills are incentivized
Internal Talent Marketplace
Anurag Seth, VP & Head Talent Transformation, Wipro narrated how Wipro aligned business goals with employee development and growth. Traditionally through its Trend.nxt initiative every individual employee was asked to pick two new skills every year to earn points and go to next level of progression (individual aspiration). However this was not working from business perspective so they tweaked the idea and asked employees to pick one skill out of the basket of high demand skills of their business group. This worked to enable the employee to be future ready with theory, hands on training and assessments in relevant skills.
Mindtree keeps track of its employees’ progress through a credit-based system on its digital learning platform Yorbit. Ritu Chakraborty, Global Head of Learning and Development at Mindtree reasoned that it is individual employee aspirations that helps Mindtree with the internal talent demand fulfilment.
What has worked
Anil Santhapuri, who recently joined as Director Skills Solution at FIS, shared that in his last assignment at CGI, a unique initiative in collaboration with FutureSkills Prime was the introduction of the Foundational Program to bring all employee at par on a basic level. Following certification, they could go in for deep skilling courses, basically skills relevant for their business group. Almost 40% of employees in India and APAC were digitally skilled in two years’ time. He believed that building on the existing nasscom NOS sheets and SSC nasscom certifications and ensuring that it is mapped to Skill architecture would help the industry a lot.
On being asked what is it that Industry would want nasscom to support with, Anurag Seth said that it would be great if nasscom could influence the college curriculums as many colleges are still teaching topics which are quite old. It is important to make colleges understand the importance of learning foundation skills and emerging skills.
Dr. Ashwin S Kumar, SVP & Head Capability Transformation and Operations, Virtusa, requested if nasscom could come up with some parameters to measure IT skills of a person; guideline/ framework in terms of certifications for the relevant technologies for e.g. Angular, Full stack etc would be useful. As Abraham Lincoln famously said -“If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe.”. The axe then is the strength multiplier. In terms of talent, learning new skills is the axe which will ensure success. Industry is recognizing this and Up-skilling and re-skilling of employees is one of the top priorities for HR in FY 2023.
This article is based on a round table conversation moderated by Priya Madhavan, nasscom. Click here to view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay2RJ_f3DVE