Adecco India’s A R Ramesh on building impactful, futuristic workforce skilling strategies

The demand situation for skilled workforce has today morphed into very complex requirements with at least two main skills, along with one or more add-on as well! In fact, there are demands where the employee is expected to be hands on with more than five skills!

Additionally, soft skills are also becoming increasingly mandatory.

Given this situation, there is a huge need for the workforce to get trained on a multitude of skills and get hands on experience working in different types of projects.

A R Ramesh, director - managed services & professional, Adecco India says as a first step, learn the technology and get certified. Then, get hands on experience by picking the right projects.

“If certifications are not there, then the candidature does not even get through the screening stage. For selection, the ability to prove past experience or writing hands on code to prove knowledge is essential. Also, from a career training/academy perspective, there are many institutions and companies that offer training programmes. There are also many centres which specialise in training fresh graduates and making them ready across a multitude of skills. These institutions work with other workforce solution companies to place the trained graduates with their customers,” he adds.

In an interaction with People Matters, Ramesh shares insights on how organisations can build impactful, futuristic skilling strategies, and the importance of technology and measurement tools in creating impactful skilling programmes.

Critical power skills that must top an organisation's skilling agenda

Firstly, it is important for organisations to understand the latest trends impacting the job market.

The world has moved away from the traditional way of executing projects for a year or two using the traditional waterfall/V-process models to a more agile led DevOps methodology. With this, the expectation is to have a team of seven to nine members who will be able to provide a workable product that is deployable every 8–12 weeks. This means that proficiency across technologies is a must.

The future is even more exciting where the motto is plug and play using containers and micro services. This means there are quite a few standard offerings, but the need for customisation and integration requires technological know-how across a multitude of skills. So basically, organisations need to start thinking of skill families rather than independent skills – For e.g. Oracle SOA with web logic along with database skills, Unix and shell scripting.

Others include Oracle Agile PLM with UX design using Figma, analytical thinking and tool knowhow, SharePoint or other collaboration techniques with Manufacturing background, Sitecore Developer with Dotnet development background NodeJs with JavaScript and RestJs.

With this kind of knowledge, it will be good for the organisations to build a skill family suite and get talent trained across the skills required for each family.

Role of technology and measurement tools in creating impactful skilling programmes

Today classroom training is passe. More and more training is self-learning, online, and self-paced with certifications to assess the level of competence. To create these trainings, deliver them and have assessments done, technology and tools play a very important role.

Also, today's learning can be customised to an individual’s learning style and capacity by using AI. This makes learning more effective and targeted to individuals.

Metaverse can play a huge role in making training feel closer to the classroom experience. Also, it can feel instructor-led and instructions can be given using a digital twin for the tutor and the trainee. Also, simulations can feel more real.

Benefits of Metaverse upskilling 

The Metaverse is expected to be the future and practically be used across all scenarios. Given this I see an immense benefit in getting people upskilled on the metaverse.

Not only metaverse, but the future is also to create citizen developers with the help of low code/no code platforms. Organisations must keep an eye on all these latest developments and ensure the strategy is built to maximise the benefits for themselves and their customers/employees.

Challenges to implementing a skilling strategy

It is important for organisations to be relevant post the skilling of talent – else the efforts and money go down the drain. Hence it is important to predict the demand patterns and be abreast on what is in store based on strong forecasting techniques.

Also, the change in technology is so rapid that new technologies and tools emerge in plenty every quarter! So being agile is key. To address this, moving to skill families is a must. Also, customers really look for experience and are apprehensive about taking in people who are just trained.

Certifications, shadowing other projects, doing model projects or contributing through crowdsourcing etc. may be a good idea to show experience.