How to skill the talent in digital skillsets

Lakshmi Mittra, VP and Head, Clover Academy

Even before the pandemic had hit us, skill-gap was becoming one of the major issues that businesses faced. Technological innovation has proceeded at an incredible pace, and traditional educational institutions haven’t been able to keep up. As per a recent Fortune survey, 71% of CEOs anticipate the skills and labour shortage to be the biggest business disrupter in 2022. Further, the digital skills gap will cost businesses trillions of dollars by the end of the decade.

This puts tremendous pressure on organizations to upskill and reskill their workforces. There are a plethora of approaches available to train the talent in digital skillsets.

Assigning mentors - Many big corporates assign senior employees as mentors to the new entrants. The purpose of this approach is to give an opportunity to the young talent to learn from the varied experience of senior employees. This also makes the new entrants feel extremely valued and privileged as this depicts that the management is interested in their growth and is taking active steps towards building them as comprehensive professionals.

On-the-Job training - This approach allows young talent to be a part of teams that work on important projects and learn from the collective experience of the team. This is a practical approach to acquiring new competencies and skills needed for a job in a real, or near-real, working environment. This practice is often used to learn how to use particular tools or equipment in a live-work or simulated environment. Rather than showing employees presentations or giving them worksheets, they learn about the nuances of a job by performing it.

Job shadowing - Unlike on-the-job training, this method involves reskilling employees by allowing them to shadow a team or a member of the team, who performs the job.

Online learning and skilling initiatives - Remote working has not only transformed the way organizations function but it has also enabled them to train and reskill their employees. The limitations of classroom training paved the way for online training and skilling. Enterprises started offering online reskilling initiatives such as short courses and certifications on new-age technologies, audios and videos for making learning interactive, and creating capsule sized content in the form of ‘Microlearning’ and ‘Nanolearning’. Microlearning aims to deliver nuggets of knowledge within the time frame of 2 to 5 minutes. Sometimes, the duration of such content pieces can go up to 10 - 15 minutes. Whereas, nanolearning delivers content within 2 minutes. Although brief in nature, it aims to cover a specific point within a learning objective.

The IT industry has played a major role in helping businesses across the globe to adopt emerging technologies and accelerate their digital transformation journeys. This, in turn, has powered record job creation. As per the Economic Times, Indian IT services created over 500,000 new jobs in FY22. In such a scenario, skilling of talent becomes extremely critical to match these requirements. Skilling of talent not only fills the prevalent skill deficit but also enables employees to evolve and enhance their capabilities.