The average shelf life of a skill has been reduced to just 5 years. Companies and HR Teams have to reassess how they train and hire their workforce if they want to keep up with the ever evolving skill marketplace.
• By 2030, 14% of the workforce will need to change jobs.
• Clear cut Jobs are old news. HR Teams will need to adopt new ways of hiring and maintaining their talent pool.
The Skill Gap is Only Growing Bigger
A study by the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that 14% of the global workforce, some 375 million workers, will need to be retrained by 2030. While new jobs are being created, millions go unfilled every year because workers lack the proper training and skills. But how did we get here? And how does your business measure up?
Don’t Blame the Pandemic
Even though the Pandemic of 2020 did force workplaces to overturn their work methods, the skill gap has been gradually increasing for a while now. To understand what is happening, we must go back to the 1800s. The Industrial Revolution was just kicking into full swing. Before that, families and individuals would be self sufficient, with a rounded set of skills that would make their ends meet. But now, with the advent of factories and industrial processes, people started specialising into very specific tasks. These tasks, while made sense in the context of an Industrial Process, had little to no practical value outside the factory. And things have only escalated from there. But to understand why the situation is so dire, we need to first know about Moore’s Law.
Moore’s Law
Gordon Moore was the co-founder of Intel. In 1965, he predicted that the power of microprocessors (the brains behind every piece of technology) doubles every two years, and the cost of this power would be halved!
But what does that mean for us?
Well, since almost all our work today revolves around computers and the internet, the capabilities of what these computers can do exponentially increases year over year. And frankly, we just can’t keep up. It takes four years of education and two more years on top of that of practical experience for someone to be considered “skilled” in a certain aspect. But by that time, technology has advanced by a factor 23 . That’s 8 times more advanced than what you end up learning. We can already see this happening in fields such as Computer Science and Architecture, where colleges are still actively teaching outdated programs, and students have to rely on Edu-tech platforms such as Udemy and Skillshare to upskill themselves.
Where do we go from here?
It used to be standard practice to see the organization through the lens of jobs. Jobs were the currency of organization design. Since then, things have become much more fluid and more complex. Skills are constantly evolving, and this is one reason we’re seeing less use of traditional competence frameworks. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have an impact on tasks rather than whole jobs. It’s the ‘arms and legs’ of jobs that are automated or augmented. For example, in the insurance industry, manual validation of simple insurance claims can be conducted by chat bot and robotic process automation, freeing customer service staff to focus on more complex claims. This automation then changes the nature of the skills required by that job and results in skills further evolving constantly. According to World Economic Forum, the shelf life of a skill is five years. Some argue it’s less than that. In this changing world, organizations need to reconsider how they look at the makeup of the workforce and start seeing employees through the lens of skills and capabilities. Not only jobs. In that way, organizations can more proactively manage these frequent changes and ensure their workforce is prepared.
How can this be applied?
A major application of these tools is to support “talent marketplaces” for people to promote their skills and for others to define what they need to fulfill jobs and tasks. Coupled with learning initiatives, this approach to skills makes it easier to find talent throughout the organization, identify skills gaps, connect employees to projects based on skill requirements and empower employees to identify development opportunities.
Introducing HR 3.0
In order to be in the best possible position to find the right candidates and empower existing employees to train and develop the new skills they need, organizations need HR 3.0 departments. This means HR departments need to reinvent themselves from HR 1.0 and 2.0 to 3.0. IBM research states that currently only 10% of organizations have achieved HR 3.0. What does this mean in practice? Traditional HR departments that focus on compliance, administration, and efficient service delivery are HR 1.0, while HR 2.0 involves integrated centres of excellence and focuses on training and empowering business partners to deliver solutions at the point of need. HR 3.0 turns HR into an agile consulting organization that promotes innovative solutions, cognitive tools, and transparency throughout the organization.
Tech AGRIM Can Help
Finding, training and maintaining a HR 3.0 Team requires more than just time and effort. You also need to know what you are doing and ensure you take the right steps for your business. Does this seem like a lot to handle? It is. This is where Tech AGRIM’s Skills On Demand Program can help take your business to the next level.