Centre for Future Workforce and Skills Empowerment

Empowering Focus on Agility through Workforce Strategies

All we understand, the imperatives of the workforce are to focus on talent-hiring, development, deployment, and managing retention. Even though we aspire to practice for the right workforce, the true challenges are how these imperatives contribute to driving an enterprise in an agile manner. The biggest question is what is the true meaning of the workforce in the context of agility, particularly in today’s changing paradigm of education?

The Bhagavad Gita is a complete guide to practical life to understand related imperatives to workforces both at the individual as well organization levels. For example, desires, skills, expectations, and organizational workforce strategies are needed to raise the consciousness to the highest possible level. A unique feature, spiritual insights manifested in Gita are universally applicable regardless of the time and the context. To be beneficial for both individual employees and serving organizations, it is recommended in Gita to nurture a divine work culture (daivisampat) that involves recognition of own talent, self-control, tolerance of scarification, with flexibility.

According to a recent report by the McKinsey, a 30% increase in employee engagement is achieved by ensuring people have autonomy and a specific attribute. In another instance, technological research and consulting firm -Gartner, 62% of knowledge workers are high performers when given significant work flexibility. Deloitte Insights also highlights that 94% of employees would stay in a company if it helped them to develop and provided them with opportunities to learn.

To this effect for retaining the employees, a few skills for the next generation will need for success. Such as Critical thinking beyond taking notes and remembering information to solve real-time problems, Adaptability can ultimately make life easier which often comes with new circumstances how several companies use modern technology to further their global presence; Excellent Communication Skills, for example, Skype to communicate within their teams, written communication is a major point; another one the Cultural understanding, an important aspect of modern life, large companies in top industries are embracing and teaching this to their employees, and lastly the ability to Initiative and drive.

This is also true that the adaptive model of the workforce (respond easily, quickly, and effectively) and extended models (focused on all stakeholders) are suitable for work characterized by a changing context, variable demand, and infrequent requirements to fill the gaps of scarce skills, and task-based work that does not need continuity of ownership. Google- as a classic example here strives to create workplaces and economic opportunities that work for both the people that we employ directly and our extended workforce of vendors, temporary staff, and independent contractors.

The latest research from the McKinsey Global Institute examines both the promise and the challenge of automation and artificial in the workplace and outlines some of the critical issues that policymakers, companies, and individuals will need to solve. Nowadays, automation and AI are transforming all kinds of business to elevate and augment people’s capabilities and will not only drive efficiencies but create new forms of creativity, innovations, and skills among the people.

Machines are doing tasks done by humans, complement the work that humans do, and even perform some tasks that go beyond what humans can do. As a result, there is a fear to lose their jobs. Therefore, in today’s technology-driven era, the workforce needs to manage any changing situation and context.

As observed, we can say that one of the most ignored facets of the workforce strategy is recognizing the talent and doing the right deployment according to time and context. A talent-based workforce strategy to the extent can set off certain concerns not only keep the employees remain stuck with the organization but also let them sustain as well, with full efficacy and complete motivation. Thus, in order to survive; agility and its response are to be dealt with growth by any means.

Gartner in this reference also emphasizes a key pillar of talent development through employee engagement – human-centric work design, reforming the culture, managing a hybrid world, digital enablement, shifting talent and skills, and re-thinking the workplace.

Janice Burns, Chief Career Experience Officer at Degreed, an education technology company once said that “Skills are the language of business,” and “There is a ‘skills revolution’ going on.”

In PwC’s 22nd Annual Global CEO Survey, 79 % of chief executives around the world said that a lack of key skills threatens their business growth. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), The current data suggest that only 2.3% of the workforce in India has undergone formal skill training as compared to 68% in the UK, 75% in Germany, 52% in the USA, 80% in Japan and 96% in South Korea. On the other hand, according to a recent survey, 48% of Indian employers reported difficulties filling job vacancies due to skill shortages.

As per the national strategy of AI for all, NITI Aayog, a trusted ecosystem for accelerated adoption of the technology for building a robust AI hub needs to be further accelerated. Although the country has a great potential for a robust start-up ecosystem for AI-powered innovations, still, there are high challenges to skill penetration.

Focusing on how work is performed using analytical and digital tools, Jira, for example, is a project tracking software application that helps teams to become more agile. The company also predicts that digital natives—people who grew up during the digital revolution—will have 20 different jobs and five different careers in their lifetimes. Only one in eight employees think that managers support creativity and innovation; only 34 percent of executives say they are equipped to lead a more diverse workforce. On the other hand, 92 percent of executives say that the challenges they face now are more complex than they were five years ago.

Blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, the internet of things, and connected clouds, we have heard about and are using – them all. These emerging technologies, despite being in their nascent stage, are significantly disrupting several industries at present.

European Union, highlights Skill Obsolescence, the indicator of adult employees (%) who believe it is likely, or very likely, that several of their skills will become outdated in the next five years. Following this measure, almost one out of two (46%) EU workers feel their skills will become outdated. However, this would drop to one in five (21%) when only those feeling this is very likely to happen are considered. Human-centric skills are based on human qualities and knowledge that machines can’t learn. A 2020 study by LinkedIn Learning identified the most in-demand soft skills like creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and emotional intelligence.

New working practices and agility, a talent-oriented workforce strategy needs to create a clear vision and direction for a change seeking new skills, particularly for Industry 4.0 to meet the workforce challenges of organizations, develop new types of the strategies in emerging demographics, meet expectations and preferences of all the stakeholders of organizations.

Digitalization and automation are other parameters of the game changers for driving agility through workforce strategies and bring many benefits—for employees and employers alike. In one European survey, about 70 percent of executives from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland said the pandemic is likely to accelerate the pace of their digital transformation. Among the potential benefits of a digital platform provide more hands to manage agility, as these platforms offer flexibility to employees and their employers. Today’s employees—all kinds—expect the same conveniences they’ve come to enjoy in their personal lives, and digital enables that.

CEO of the Mckinsey quoted once, “If your company is to gain value from the cloud, your IT department must become more agile if it isn’t already”. Therefore, Digital platforms can also foster user-centric design (heuristic evaluations, eye tracking, and web analytics), which enables organizations to deliver content and information that is relevant to all employee types. On the training part, such digital platforms can enable the employee to simplify online courses namely – Digital Marketing, Business Analytics, 3D Animation, Bigdata, Hadoop, and so on.

Just as customers can support companies that align with their values, employees can choose to bring their talents to organizations that take meaningful stands on relevant issues. Today, nearly half (appx. 43%) of workers think the Covid-19 crisis marks the end of every day in the workplace. Whether this is true or not, the on-demand workforce, hybrid work models, and work untethered from physical offices are all on the rise.

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, A CEO of the topmost gender consulting firm, has quoted in the Harvard Business Review, that the life expectancies stretch toward 100 years, and the traditional career map urgently needs a rethink. He mentioned, that in Europe, the over-50s are the fastest-growing workers, increasing by about 300,000 between 2018 and 2019 and rapidly approaching a third of all workers. On the other place, in the United States, the proportion of over-65 workers has doubled to 20% since 1985 and accounts for 53% of the college-educated workforce. Boomers are starting to think that retiring at 65 years when you may live to 80 or 90 — leaves a little too much time for golf. And that means we need to start redefining the standard career trajectory.

In many cases, the first step to supporting more flexible arrangements of workforce is simply asking your people what they want. Another company instituted optional, confidential “mid-life” reviews for all employees over the age of 45 to better understand and support their plans for the future. Both employee confidence and engagement rose significantly in response; in fact, the program was so successful that the company started offering it as a service to their clients as well. Just asking your people about how they envision their career paths can give you the tools you need to better support those paths.

In the more responsible sector like higher education, the target market is no longer limited to skilling new high school graduates, however, it has been expanded to a pool of potential applicants who are diversifying across race and ethnicity, age, and due to changing socioeconomic factors. This changing audience is challenging institutions with new expectations that traditional academic programs and their delivery with technology offerings may not be equipped to meet.

As the higher education environment continues to transform, maintaining the status quo is the riskiest move leaders can make. Positioning your institution for long-term financial and operational success starts with more than near-term tactics; it demands a new, strategic business model for survival and years to come.

As a key focus, four areas- academic portfolio optimization, revenue-driving partnerships, education delivery innovation, and evolving pricing structure which higher education leaders could be explored more when building future-proof business models.

Workforce for reinventing the future

Employees are now starting to ask human questions about the work they perform. Why am I doing this? What is it for? How can we do it better? Many are choosing to leave their jobs. The competition to attract new talent is growing fiercer than ever.

As per recent research, seven Major areas that will dominate the workforce will be Reinvention, Scarcity, Vitality, Sustainability, Individuality, Inclusivity & accountability.

According to the report by PWC, there will be four Worlds of Work in 2030.

a) First Yellow would be more human and ethics centric;

b) the second one is the Red where innovations in the whole economy will be the drivers of the workforce;

c) Next, the third one -Green would be more responsibility-oriented and trust-dominated;

d) the last, the Blue World will be focused on capitalism.

Future Skills those needed by 2030- Cognitive flexibility, Digital literacy, and computational thinking, Judgment and decision-making, Emotional and social intelligence, Creative and innovative mindset, Analytical thinking and innovation and Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility. A few of the most in-demand technology skills that can shape your future much better include Cloud Computing, Data Science & Cyber Security, AI, Blockchain, and Robotics in the technology domain.

Accenture predicts that by 2050, 45 percent of workers will be contractors. Employees are aware of the rapid speed at which work is changing, and 78 percent of workers are worried that they will not be able to keep up with the rise of new technology to remain effective.

Many corporates are seen to offer greater flexibility to develop Flexi career paths around where people work, more adaptation is required to meet the needs of today’s evolving workforce. Therefore, corporate must begin to consider not just how to flex working hours, but also how to flex the pace of entire careers across more years and life phases.

To prepare accordingly, workers can look to both reskill as well as add and refine the list of soft skills that will continue to be in demand.

Few important takeaways and recommendations from the above deliberations:

• Talent mobility focuses on companies understanding how to optimize their organization for productivity, growth, and success – all while keeping their employees engaged in both their current and future careers.

• By analyzing and understanding the external talent market, companies should make more informed decisions about where they could or should be hiring and how to prioritize the talent component of real estate investment decisions

• Both employers and employees must recognize that making provisions for hybrid and flexible work is a necessity, but not all employers have created and communicated a formal and clear policy and guidelines.

• Employees must feel empowered, as yet nearly half (43%) of respondents say they’re likely to leave their employer in the next year.

• Focused areas of managing the workforce and driving through agility include employee managing in a hybrid world, reforming the culture, and human-centric work design (productivity, more autonomy of work, maximizing benefits of hybrid working, and developing and promoting the skills)

• For business outcomes by rethinking the workplace, shifting talent and skills, and digital enablement (Prioritize technologies, automation, and behavioral tools, optimize hybrid work in the short term and fuel organizational prosperity in the long-term digital future, and hybrid work era)

• An analysis of return on investment (ROI) on talent investment must be carried out by redesigning jobs, moving away from the concept of job roles to focusing on the tasks that can make up a job in order to deliver greater value for the organization and the individual

• Technical ability and human new skills like creativity, collaboration, and leadership, their approach to skill scarcity, polarization and need to speak out, and persistent gender gap can drive the agility to grow in demand while admin, hospitality, and legal/business support jobs will decline.

• Increasing social tension and greater recognition of inequity, especially with regards to race, can call for more transparency from organizations around human capital, diversity, and inclusion initiatives as key to recovery and growth.

• Companies must proactively normalize both lifelong learning and lifelong caregiving responsibilities — regardless of gender or age. Flexible, part-time roles have become popular among many young parents, but they skew heavily female, as many managers remain less open to supporting part-time and other non-traditional work arrangements for male employees. Interestingly, flex roles are also increasingly popular among an older, mostly-male management workforce who may want (or need) to continue working longer than they thought.

• Reducing an organization’s overall footprint, greater mobility, and creating job opportunities beyond borders will drive both employee and employer preferences leading to agility.

While we believe there will be enough work to go around (barring extreme scenarios), society will need to grapple with significant workforce transitions and dislocation. Workers will need to acquire new skills and adapt to the increasingly capable machines alongside them in the workplace. They may have to move from declining occupations to growing and, in some cases, new occupations.

As evident, many of the above workforce trends aren’t new, but dramatic changes in the past have only accelerated them as well as a need for action. Now instead of preparing for a far-off future, it’s time to start performing for the future that is here-and-now.

“Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” – Albert Einstein

In the nutshell, the composition of today’s changing workforce will only continue to evolve and remain challenging for training our minds for our survival all the time. Thus, a new kind of agility will be the challenging one, however, successful organizations will likely be those that continuously improve the way they team with workers, and understand technological applications and human values all for their progress, growth, and human kinds.

Adapting quickly to the new trends and meeting industry requirements is the need of the hour, in the absence of which professionals would gradually fall and enterprises would fade away. We hope the country and the community at large will join and support us in this effort to create a responsible workforce society and unleash the enormous potential of each one of us.

Management Empowerment Foundation has a special focus towards skill development to cater to the growing scientific sector. This sector requires special skills to carry out research & innovation like big data analysis, operation of special equipment and so on. Development of such skills can remove disconnect between demand and supply of skilled manpower, building the vocational and technical training framework, skill up-gradation, building of new skills, and innovative thinking not only for existing jobs but also jobs that are to be created in this sector.

The opportunities that the foundation promotes are the followings:

Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY)

Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) is the flagship scheme of the Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship (MSDE). This scheme has been launched in three phases. Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY 3.0) was launched on 15 January 2021, which aims to encourage and promote skill development throughout the country to address industry needs, meet market demands and impart skills in services and in new-age job roles.

The scheme has two components, Central Component and State Component. Skill training is being imparted under three categories, pan-India:
1. Short Term Training (STT)
2. Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL)
3. Special Project (SP)

Eligibility: For Short Term Training (STT): Any unemployed youth, aged between 15-45 years.

For Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL): Any candidate of Indian nationality, aged between 18-45 years, has prior experience in the job role for which they want RPL certification and
Possesses.

For Special Project (SP): Specialist Organisations, like NGOs, research labs, educational or financial institutions and other expert organizations, who are experienced and specialized in working with and skilling of marginalized communities or specialized in working in proposed difficult geographies

Funding Agency: National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC)

Contact info: PMKVY@nsdcindia.org; grievance@pmkvk.org

Website: https://www.pmkvyofficial.org/

Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Kendra (PMKK)

Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) has established visible and aspirational Model Training Centres (MTCs) in every district of the country. These Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Kendra (PMKK) provides the opportunity to the trainee, who wish to learn something, and the trainer also who wish to train someone in particular areas.

A loan up to 75% of the project investment is being provided for the purpose.

Eligibility: For Trainee- Any youth
For Trainer- The trainer and trainee ratio should be of 1:30 and every lab has a demonstrator / trainer to manage practical training, trainers for soft skill training and one placement counselor

Funding Agency: Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE

Contact info: grievance@nsdcindia.org; proposals@nsdcindia.org

Website: https://nsdcindia.org/pmkk

India International Skill Centre (IISC) Network

IISC Network is the nodal platform to facilitate international workforce mobility opportunities for Indians. This network will be central to the GOI’s plan to make India the skill capital of the world. It will be a fee-based, market-driven model, determined by global workforce supply and demand dynamics.

Contact info: iisc@nsdcindia.org

Website: https://nsdcindia.org/iisc-network

Technical Intern Training Program (TITP)

The program aims to contribute to developing countries by accepting its people and transferring skills through On-the-job Training (OJT) in Japan. It promotes international cooperation through the transfer of skills, techniques, and knowledge gained by technical interns to developing nations.

Contact info: nsdcjapanteam@nsdcindia.org

Website: https://nsdcindia.org/home-titp

Skill Impact Bond

The objective of the impact bond is to address the youth employment crisis and specifically that for young women.

Contact info: grievance@nsdcindia.org

Website: https://nsdcindia.org/sib

Seekho aur Kamao

Seekho aur Kamao (Learn & Earn) is a scheme implemented by the Ministry of Minority Affairs for J&K and Ladakh and is aimed at the skill development of minorities. The scheme entails upgrading the skills of minority youth in various modern / traditional skills depending upon their qualification, present economic trends, and market potential, which can earn them suitable employment or equip them with skills to opt for self-employment.

Eligibility: Any minority youth

Funding Agency: Ministry of Minority Affairs

Contact info: grievance@nsdcindia.org

Website: https://nsdcindia.org/seekhoaurkamao

Skilled Workers Arrival Database for Employment Support (SWADES)

It aims to create a database of qualified citizens based on their skill sets and experience to tap into and fulfil demand of Indian and foreign companies. The collected information will be shared with the companies for suitable placement opportunities in the country.

Eligibility: All overseas citizens who return through Vande Bharat Mission during COVID Pandemic.

Contact info: grievance@nsdcindia.org

Website: http://nsdcindia.org/swades/

SWAYAM

SWAYAM is a program initiated by the Government of India and designed to achieve the three cardinal principles of Education Policy viz., access, equity, and quality. The objective of this effort is to take the best teaching-learning resources to all, including the most disadvantaged. SWAYAM seeks to bridge the digital divide for students who have hitherto remained untouched by the digital revolution and have not been able to join the mainstream of the knowledge economy.