Embracing skills-on-demand is among the top three priorities for any digital leader, since it is being exacerbated daily by the spiralling growth of digital and innovative technologies. In this blog post, we shall be drilling deeper into this topic and discussing how leaders can address this challenge.
In an earlier blog post, I discussed the leading cloud imperatives for business leaders in the coming year. One of these imperatives I highlighted was how enterprises need to be flexible in terms of adopting a skills-on-demand approach to bridge the severe skill gap that many digital teams are facing.
New Normal Challenges
More than 90% of enterprises around the world have made the shift to cloud services. The combined pressures of the pandemic and changes in consumer preferences have made cloud and digital transformation an essential enabler of business. But for many organizations, this transformation has pushed them out of their comfort zones, especially given the suddenness of the shift and the scale of flexible working modes such as remote work and distributed teams. Faced with this unprecedented change, many organizations remain entrenched in the older, traditional ways of working and struggle to make the most of their cloud opportunity. A fundamental challenge in overcoming this obstacle lies in the severe technical skill gap these organizations face. And to make matters worse, the demand for skilled technical talent has skyrocketed in the last two years, making it much harder for even proactive enterprises to find the right talent.
Finding the Right Match
Last year, the crisis reached an all-time high, with as much as 69% of employers struggling to find the right skillset with a blend of technical skills and distinctive human traits including adaptability, stress tolerance, resilience, reliability, discipline, and accountability. And even as more and more skilled workers begin to enter the marketplace, businesses are finding it increasingly difficult for organizations to find the right match – the right people, in the right place, at the right time – at least as per their expectations. This shortage isn’t confined to just specialized technical areas but also to the shortage of skilled management that is capable of operating within the new normal. In fact, acquiring managers with the skills to run remote teams is itself a fairly new domain and continues to be underestimated by many organizations. In many ways, it’s akin to the iconic lines from Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – “Water, water everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink”. And dealing with this challenge requires organizations to adopt a global perspective that goes beyond traditional ways of hiring and working.
Shifting Perspectives: Adopting a Global Mindset
Under these circumstances, embracing a Skills-on-Demand mindset becomes crucial, as it is designed to not only match technically skilled resources to enterprise requirements but also include the layer of managerial expertise that can effectively make remote work and distributed teams more productive than their older counterparts. This is also a particularly urgent requirement as we’ve witnessed a high rate of upskilling of workers with a wide range of industry experience in many parts of the world, and leveraging this talent pool can help alleviate skills shortage concerns, making it a business imperative. And while the assurance from localized resources is preferable, it comes at too high a loss of opportunity and growth in the new digitally-enabled business paradigm. For traditionalists, this notion may seem like the cost arbitrage savings model that was adopted decades ago. But today, this isn’t about low-level technical labour acquired pennies on the dollar, but in fact, about maximizing on-demand access to high-level skillsets that are essential for business success. Businesses can no longer afford to limit their search for skilled resources within geographic boundaries.
The Way Forward
Digital leaders need to rapidly begin leveraging the global talent pool by seeking out skills-on-demand partners. This will not only shorten or eliminate the time gap in kick-starting new products or solutions innovation but also rapidly advance and complete their digital transformation initiatives. Of course, it is reasonable for leaders to have concerns about trust and risk in any engagement that involves non-local resources. But these are mainly fear-oriented reactions which presume a no-win solution. In reality, issues of trust, reliability, and compliance, are the key differentiators on which modern skills-on-demand partners operate. These concerns can be directly addressed with the right decision making when seeking a solution partner. A capable skill-on-demand partner can demonstrate how capable they are in exerting the necessary controls to offset any risk concerns while offering extreme flexibility and competence in an outcome-driven skill-on-demand offering.
Conclusion
For leaders, taking their organizations into the future requires them to think and act boldly. This includes engaging in the same due diligence as they did earlier when seeking other solutions partners. The fundamentals do not change and as long as businesses seek out partner organizations with a proven track record and established credentials, they will be able to adapt to the new normal and enhance their business operations to meet the opportunities of the modern era.