Leveraging the 4Cs for a Future-Ready Workforce
According to the World Economic Forum report, India's unemployment increased to 23% from 10.4% in 2020. The lack of skills necessary for employment is one of the leading causes of this problem. When our students reach the workforce, the skills they received during their college education are found to be outdated.
Globally, according to the World Economic Forum, to adapt to the changing nature of occupations by 2025, more than half of all employees worldwide would need to upskill or reskill. All those who are currently unemployed are not included in that figure. This emphasizes that industry, academia, and the public sector need to move skill development to the top of their investment priorities and transformation charters in order to bridge the growing skill gap.
While today’s workforce will need to learn new skills and learn to adapt as new technologies emerge continuously, it is essential to address the following queries:
- “What do organizations need to do to help their employees stay relevant and become future-ready?”
- “How can industry, academia, and the public sector collaborate to help our students, our future workforce, become ready for the future?”
How organizations can help their employees stay relevant and future-ready
Organizations must inculcate the right learning culture, set up the required infrastructure, and provide incentives to enable employees to learn and adapt continuously. This means making learning a crucial part of the employer value proposition and embedding learning culture in performance evaluation in your organization.
For creating a structured learning environment, we can follow a 4Cs framework.
- Competency building
- Community learning
- Communication skills development
- Connecting to the bigger picture
Competency Building
Organizations must assist employees in understanding the importance of competency development and establishing it as a critical employee success measure, as well as provide learning resources and enable access to Edutech platforms, partner-led training, and work-lab environments. To assess and benchmark employees, organizations should develop a combination of internal validations and industry certifications. This will assist employees in understanding their position within their peer group.
Learning adjacent skills: Organizations need to help employees choose the next best skill they can learn or adjacent skills. Learning & skill development goes far beyond providing learning capsules and certification programs. It includes developing learning paths based on future skill projections and enabling people to learn adjacent skills. Defined skill clusters complement each other and increase an associate's value as they continue learning more from that skills cluster. It will provide a clear learning path to employees so that every incremental learning has a multiplier effect on the employee’s skill profile.
Leadership roles: Managers play a crucial role in encouraging and enabling employees. Organizations need to focus on upskilling managers with technology and softer skills, which will effectively penetrate the grassroots levels. Executive leadership can set examples and become ambassadors by showcasing their learning and creating a top-down culture of learning.
Including competency building as a part of the formal performance assessment can be a great way to encourage employees to upskill.
Community Learning
Apprenticeship: Bring the joy back to learning! Apprenticeship is where employees learn the soft skills that allow them to utilize their complex learnings in work environments that are, let’s face it, fuzzy and unpredictable. And that, after all, is what we all value in the human worker, as opposed to a machine.
Mentorship: Mentorship, guidance, and career coaching play a key role in employee success. Bringing associates with similar technical aptitude and having a mentor with similar technology skills and aptitude will make a great team learn and grow together.
Thriving communities: Setting up communities of technologists will help them share knowledge, success stories, and industry updates. They will benefit from each other and thrive. This will also help associates from different domains and industries come together, which will help expand business acumen massively. Working in silos, technologists may swing the pendulum towards technology/coding itself rather than the outcome, the big-picture view and appreciate its impact and benefits. Community learning will help them broaden their perspective, and understand the domain and industry requirements, which will help them in their approach to engineering.
Innovation as a culture: Imbibing the culture of innovation and providing a platform for employees to share their ideas is a great way to foster innovation at the gross root levels. Employees can further collaborate with their peers and experts to evaluate, refine and build their ideas into commercially viable solutions. An organization’s ability to link learning and skilling to foster innovation is sure to lead to great results.
Rewards: Make contributions to community development as part of the formal performance process and provide formal reward and recognition to boost community engagement.
Communication Skill Development
Another critical challenge today is that basic soft skills are taken for granted. A majority of our workforce lacks professional communication and presentation skills. Organizations need to emphasize communication skills and develop these in partnership with training institutions.
Connecting to the bigger picture
It is difficult to categorize technology enterprises into one industry vertical because their services stretch across several different industry verticals. For instance, depending on how one looks, Meta appears to be a social media platform, a digital payment transaction app, a microblogging site, a 3D gaming platform, etc.
Numerous variables affect leadership success. A crucial skill is the capacity to draw connections and consider the larger picture in order to express viewpoints that are not yet obvious to others.
How industry, academia, and public sector can collaborate to help students, our future workforce, become ready for the future?
As organizations transitioned to the new normal, technology's assimilation into everyday life quickened and highlighted a glaring digital divide in the workforce. The businesses that adopted digital transformation not only survived but also grew despite the crisis. They set the groundwork for strong growth in the new normal because of their fast learning and agile implementation. Similar to this, upskilling is an essential and unavoidable component of the ongoing success of not only enterprises but also of global economies.
Industry can collaborate with academia for upskilling in multiple ways. Centres of Excellence (CoE) are a great way to cooperate. These CoEs established by sectors of technology clusters in college premises will give the students an early start and enable them to seize the opportunities as they come out of educational streams.
Another challenge educational institutions face today is the lack of digitally skilled staff. Faculty lack awareness about applications of technology. Unlike medicine, they are not in active practice. Industry can collaborate to train and provide practical exposure to academia while supplying some of their best technologists as visiting faculty to colleges.
While today’s workforce will need to learn new skills and learn to adapt as new technologies emerge continuously, it is essential to address the following queries: “How can industry, academia, and the public sector collaborate to help our students, our future workforce, become ready for the future?” Organizations must assist employees in understanding the importance of competency development and establishing it as a critical employee success measure, as well as provide learning resources and enable access to Edutech platforms, partner-led training, and work-lab environments.
Organizations must inculcate the right learning culture, set up the required infrastructure, and provide incentives to enable employees to learn and adapt continuously. Organizations must assist employees in understanding the importance of competency development and establishing it as a critical employee success measure, as well as provide learning resources and enable access to Edutech platforms, partner-led training, and work-lab environments. Organizations need to help employees choose the next best skill they can learn. Including competency building as a part of the formal performance assessment can be a great way to encourage the employees to upskill.
About FutureSkills Prime:
FutureSkills Prime started as a platform with a vision to upskill/reskill every Indian citizen in emerging technologies. A joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and National Association of Software and Services Companies (nasscom), it brings a synergy between the Government, Industry, Academia towards the eventual goal of making India a digital talent nation. A novel skilling program, it incentivizes the cost of the eligible course(s), providing authentic and accredited certifications acceptable in the industry.
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Written by: Venkatesan Vijayaraghavan, EVP and Global Head – Technology Service Lines