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Here’s a question every leader should answer: Do you have a clear understanding of your people’s skills, and where the gaps are? Odds are, the answer is no. Although the cloud, digitization, and the Internet of Things allow businesses to gather and analyze all sorts of data, few organizations today have a system in place to track the skills they have. And even fewer apply that knowledge to gauge what skills they lack, both now and in the future.
PwC’s(Price Waterhouse Cooper) most recent CEO survey found that more than half of CEOs said they were exploring how machines and humans can work together. And 39 percent said they’re considering the effect automation will have on their workforce. Even now, with automation still in its early days, CEOs told us that finding the skills they need has become the biggest challenge to their business — a situation that will only get more acute as technology evolves and competition for talent tightens.
Given the dynamics, it is vital for you to have a system in place that can track and analyze the skills your people already have — and those they may need soon. Building such a system is a significant undertaking. Breaking it down into four steps can help you get started.
Step 1: Make an inventory of your people’s dynamic skills. Start by considering the particular skills your business needs, and then categorize them. Creating an inventory can’t be a one-time exercise, or a static project. You’ll need to update it as your people’s skills evolve, as your organization’s needs change, and as people come and go.
Step 2: Organize your inventory. Organize it in a way that makes it highly searchable. The key here is to make sure you can search and access the data quickly, with good results.
Step 3: Analyze your skills. The goal here is to gain insight into where your employees’ skills are the strongest, where they’re thin, and where the gaps are, and then whether those gaps are on the functional side or the technical side.
Step 4: Plan for the future. Trying to gauge the skills your company will need two to three years down the road with a few viable scenarios can be a valuable exercise. Rather than being caught off guard by a sudden gap in skills or having to hire people with certain skills at the last minute in the open market, companies armed with such knowledge can plan ahead through hiring, training, and career development strategies.
There’s a lot we don’t know about tomorrow. But workers and organizations should be as ready as possible. By identifying the skills you need and starting to concentrate on how to build them, you’ll be better prepared for the changes coming your way.
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Gen Xers are known for questioning authority—and as they steadily infiltrate the C-suite, they’re living up to the reputation by rewriting the rules for corporate headquarters. While Millennials have been getting all the attention for transforming the workplace simply by joining it, the MTV generation has been coolly and quietly transforming it from the inside out, from where headquarters are located, to how they’re being designed.
Generally more autonomous, Gen Xers are independent thinkers who grew up learning to be skeptical of old ways—and corporate real estate decisions. Generational differences are fueling all-new office designs, such as activity-based workplaces that will help carry organizations into the future of work, and designs that favor casual collisions over boxy offices. Plus, to aid a work-life balance, the GenX CEO knows they need to ensure their organizations are run efficiently and productively—and that means inspiring talent of all generations.
They also know that to get the business results they want they need to go where the talent is. With Millennials, who make up increasingly large proportions of the workforce, basing themselves in the cities, it makes sense to move headquarters back into urban centers.
The commercial office market is shifting seismically, too, as developers and landlords work to accommodate the multi-generational interest in working in positive, collaborative environments. Innovative work spaces, such as coffee lounges, internal co-working areas, war rooms and incubator spaces are popping up to accommodate workers’ desire to come together.
Although there’s no one-size fits all approach for success, thinking outside of the box and not being afraid to do things a little differently – which Gen Xers do very well – go a long way in creating spaces where workers of all ages enjoy spending time.
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As digital transformation disrupts the workplace, one factor more than any other will determine which companies turn digital to their advantage. That critical element is people: the talented employees who are able to use existing digital technologies and adapt to evolving methods and new approaches. Without these employees, companies will struggle to benefit as they should from the latest advances—everything from Industry 4.0 and robots to artificial intelligence, data science, virtual reality, and new digital business models.
Companies should respond to this challenge by building new pools of skilled digital employees. To do so, they must understand who these potential employees are, where they can be found, and how they can be attracted and retained. Companies also need to know what kinds of talent can be nurtured within the existing employee base; digital talent must come not only from the acquisition of new personnel for specific jobs but also from the development of digital skills in existing roles.
The “Who”
For any digital people strategy, the first step is defining what “digital talent” means. To facilitate such understanding, we have identified (through analysis of nearly a million recruitment profiles and from dozens of interviews with practitioners) six areas where digital talent can have the most impact. These areas are digital business, digital marketing, digital development, advanced analytics, Industry 4.0, and new ways of working.
We believe a strategic planning effort could help companies understand their digital talent needs—and provide valuable insights as they embark on the recruitment and development effort to fill the inevitable gaps. (See Exhibit 2 for a workforce planning example.) The planning effort can employ several scenarios based on various assumptions about the future demand for, and supply of, digital talent. And the scenarios can be updated as assumptions are confirmed or refuted.
The “Where”
As companies begin their recruiting efforts, they need to know not only whom they are looking for but also where to look. This is particularly true for organizations with a global footprint. These organizations must identify cities that have a good supply of digital talent—cities where the company will seem attractive to native residents and where the company will be able to build up its digital resources over the medium to long term.
The “How”
Once the company has a detailed understanding of the “who” and the “where,” it needs to tackle the “how”—how to recruit and select the right digital talent in an era when high demand for such talent and low-cost access to information put the power in the hands of the job candidates. Step into their shoes. On the basis of our analysis of more than 100 recruiting methods and interviews with more than 50 top recruiters, we have identified several best practices in the search for scarce digital resources. Most important of these, we believe, is understanding how digital employees think.
The employees with this mindset are entrepreneurial and inclined to data-driven decision making. They focus on user-centric product and service development and are passionate about creating and building. They are experienced in multidisciplinary teams and show a strong tendency toward collaborative and agile ways of working.
When it comes to the work environment, digital employees are more concerned about their product portfolio—the projects and products they build—than about prestigious titles or linear career paths. They want to be surrounded by inspiring peers and thought leaders in their field of expertise. In addition, they are more open than traditional employees to unconventional forms of compensation, such as stock options and shares in intellectual property. Many also want to make a meaningful, positive impact on the world, and most would like to define their own work-life balance. In short, digital employees make up a specific recruiting pool that requires new ways of attracting and selecting talent.
More than 90% of digital employees today use online tools and communities in their job search. And they find new jobs in an average of less than two weeks. To compete for these individuals, traditional recruiting practices are not enough. Companies today need recruiting staff with social media and online networking skills, HR software capabilities, and digital knowledge. Only programmers can recruit programmers; recruiters must speak the language of their candidates.
Most organizations have already developed some form of strategy for online recruiting; however, their plans often fall short. One reason is that the digital talent they seek might be using only group-specific recruiting platforms, such as AngelList for entrepreneurs, GitHub and Stack Overflow for engineers, Dribbble and Behance for designers, or Kaggle for data scientists. Recent technophile graduates may be using platforms such as The Muse or apps such as Debut in their job hunts. To reach these people, companies need to use the appropriate platforms.
Recruiters can also reach a broader pool of digital employees by addressing their interests directly. They can connect with digital talent in person, for example, by participating in targeted informal events such as CreativeMornings, a breakfast lecture series for the digital community that takes place in cities around the world. These events allow creative people of all types to mingle, network, and share insights before the workday begins. Other methods include sponsorship of virtual competitions through online communities such as HackerRank or of live events such as hackathons, or codathons, which bring together large groups of programmers—typically students—to build websites, mobile apps, and other projects in a relatively short amount of time.
A more costly approach to recruitment is “acquihiring”: buying a company not for its business or product line but for its talent.
Once the right target groups have been reached, it’s the selection and recruiting process that will distinguish the successful company from its competitors. Most traditional companies still need to speed up and automate this process—to become fully digital. With so many new digital employees in their ranks, companies need to create an environment in which these individuals will want to stay for the long term.
The “What”
Although recruiting a new pool of digital talent with specific profiles is essential, the enormity of the demand for digitally savvy employees means that not everyone can be brought in from outside the business. Nor would a company want to turn over the majority of its workforce. Instead, it is today’s marketing, finance, manufacturing, HR, and other staff who make up the core of the workforce for the digital journey.
To understand how much of the demand can be met internally, companies must first understand what digital skills are needed by which of their current functions and job profiles. When these needs are fully defined, companies can then create and institute a digital enablement program to train employees to the appropriate levels.
The matrix shows the profile group (finance, for example), the subprofiles within the group (such as controllers, accountants, and treasurers), the top digital skills each subprofile needs, and the maximum skill levels that could be required. The matrix also includes the number of full-time employees in each profile, which allows the company to see how many employees will be needed and what kind of skill building each function will require.
To create a truly digital culture, the organization needs to introduce and adapt to new forms of cooperation, implementing more project-based work and running these projects in a more flexible way. It must introduce new working methods such as agile and user-centric product design, along with more experimentation and creativity, fewer fixed rules, and more tolerance for risk taking. Digitally savvy employees tend to be fast learners who crave responsibility and impact, but they will make mistakes; a culture that accepts failure is essential.
The new culture should also extend to the workspace, utilizing progressive office design to attract talent and foster innovation. Any company that is adapting to this mindset is also taking a significant step in the larger organizational transformation that is now underway, as the new ways of working go well beyond the field of digital.
