The must-have technology and skills in the evolving working spaces

The pandemic has changed our lives, the way we work, meet, collaborate and co-create. We all are taking extensive preventive measures to ensure a safe and secure environment. Many have redesigned their offices with an agile, collaborative & open approach to enable appropriate social distancing and safety protocols. There is no longer a scenario that anyone must come to the office just to do their routine work. But that require some specific skills as well.

We spoke to Thirukkumaran (Thiru) Nagarajan, Vice President & Head of HR, IBM India/South Asia, to understand the must have technologies and required skills to cope in the new era.

The must-have technology

Technologies like AI, analytics and automation on the cloud have become pervasive across organizations, including the HR function. We are seeing it being leveraged on multiple fronts related to talent such as skilling, matching employees, and external candidates with career opportunities, supporting managers with better salary investment guidance, eliminating manual tasks in benefits administration, payroll through robotic process automation, and many others including performance management.

It is all about translating multiple structured and unstructured data points regarding the employee and business outcomes into talent insights that enable managers to make better performance decisions. At IBM, we have been experiencing the positive impact of these new-age technologies firsthand for a few years now - as IBM is client zero for its own HR technology & talent transformation solutions. We have been able to leverage technology effectively to enhance our employee experiences across the world.

Skilling and Re-skilling

Skills do not have the same shelf-life they once did. It is important for companies to set a tone for continuous learning to retain top talent. Continuous learning is a top priority and we are guided by the skills that our clients require across multiple industries, with primary focus on hybrid cloud & AI. We offer an enhanced skilling experience which prioritizes technical content and customized, role-based learning plans. For our employees, IBM is like a university which caters to infinite curiosity for learning & development.

To put it in better perspective, let me give a glimpse into some skilling data for IBM India from last year. Total number of learning hours by IBMers in India was 5.1M (close to 12% increase YoY) thanks to an improved experience that prioritizes technical content and customized, role-based learning plans

o Cloud, Industry, Analytics, Design Thinking & AI were the top 5 Tech learning categories

o Professional Development, Leadership, sales & soft skills were the other behavioural learning categories

More than 338K total badges were earned by IBMers in India with 66% under Strategic skills.

o Top 5 badges were Enterprise Design Thinking Practitioner, Agile Explorer, Cognitive Practitioner, Automation & Blockchain Essentials

We also focus on ‘Skills First’ hiring where we prioritize the right mix of in-demand skills over specific degrees when looking for talent to work in technology's fastest-growing areas. For some roles, it is not about their training background, as long as they have the necessary skills to do the job.