Upskilling is the deciding factor
Business battles are fiercely fought and won not in markets, but training rooms
With
the advent of smart phones, cloud computing and social networks, even the
everyday and mundane aspects of our lives have changed dramatically. The way we
book our tickets for an outstation journey, plan and organise our stay, hail a
cab, buy groceries, look for a restaurant, plan a visit to a friend and conduct
many other day-to-day activities has changed.
Similarly, almost every business process has been deeply
impacted by digital technologies. Various functions carried out across the
organisation by employees0, right from the CEO to the junior-most executive,
have undergone a sea change. For communication, social media, video, online
notice boards, chats and webinars are used extensively. Online tools are used
to invite vendors, compare proposals and place orders.
All functions in the company, including human resources,
finance, sales, manufacturing, supply chain and after-sales services, are
performed with almost complete reliance on IT tools.
Therefore, employees should be savvy in using IT tools.
Asking employees to take advantage of IT tools and deliver more in terms of
volume is the order of the day. Upskilling and retraining employees have never
be so important as it is now. Naturally, this need is felt the most in the IT
sector, where engineers have to constantly learn new technologies and apply
them in solving business problems.
However, in all other sectors too, upskilling is
necessary to reduce the cycle time and increase the number of tasks employees
do on a typical day.
Upskilling is not easy. The technological changes around
us have been rapid. While trying to keep pace with them, we face many
challenges. One, learning ability varies from person to person. All organisations
do not have the bandwidth to retrain employees to enable them take on new
tasks.
Upskilling is not about getting people to attend a
training programme. One of the major impediments to upskilling is making
employees accept the fact that the training is for their good and they must use
the acquired knowledge to take on more responsibilities. For these programmes
to succeed, leaders have to drive this change from the front. As the pace of
conducting business has increased greatly, organisations tend to look for
ready-made talent. At times, they look for an instant solution, pretty much
like having a noodle in two minutes.
They run a few training programmes and hope that their
employees would be able to deliver the expected results immediately after the
training. Patience is a virtue, but not found aplenty because of the
extraordinarily high demands on the business. Hence, this is the biggest
impediment companies will encounter on the path to upskilling.
When an organisation lays off employees whose skills are
outdated, there are many hidden costs such as the cost of recruiting a new
person, inducting and training him or her, besides the severance pay. Apart
from these costs, the performance of new hires may pose a risk to the company’s
reputation. If the employee is willing to learn and apply the newly-acquired
skills, the leadership must create an environment in which the employees know
what is coming and get a fair chance to explore the opportunity of acquiring
new skills, take on new challenges and get updated with the times they live in.
The leadership must be transparent and build an environment of trust between
the employees and their managers such that the need of upskilling does not come
as a shock. It’s highly desirable that the employee sees the need of upskilling
and looks for avenues to stay relevant.
Organisational culture plays an important role in this
area.
Source | The Hindu | 7
September 2017
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Knowledge Repository
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming
Conference | National
Conference on Transforming Libraries into Knowledge Resource Centres 11th –
12th January 2018, SNDT Mumbai For further details contact Prof Jyoti Bhabal (jyotibhabal@gmail.com )
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