Blog entry by Ken Interactive
Consider this. Say you are a shop floor manager, supervising 7 assembly workers, in a soda bottling company. They are all excellent people, working their hearts out. But, last month there was a complete upgrade to the manufacturing floor, with technology, technology everywhere ! And now there are at least three of them he needs to re-assign or re-skill or is it upskill? And the last option, he doesn’t want to go there, but Fire and hire? Has it come that? You wonder.
Because, Jo, who had been in Packaging for the past 20 years, has to move to another part of the plant, complete takeover by machines in Packaging! He’s completely redundant. Sheila in the Filling room needs to operate a new computer system to do her job and Mike a safety technician has to set new rules on the floor to make friends with the new automatons and all the new whirring computer systems.
Everything is new in 2020!
The Skilling imperative
This dilemma is a burgeoning challenge. It may be clichéd but in today’s world change is the only thing that is constant.
McKinsey’s Global Initiative Study (2017)
According to McKinsey’s extensive research-based report titled, “Jobs lost, jobs gained: What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages”, published in 2017, while technology advancements are “increasing productivity and improving lives”, the effects they have on jobs is significant. In their research with regards to the effect on jobs world over that this trend is having, they predict about 14% of the workforce may need to switch jobs or learn new skills, within the next 10 years. They equate the paradigm shift in jobs to the Agricultural and Manufacturing revolutions and expect that some jobs may be lost because of sudden obsolescence of certain types of work. If the upskilling or re-skilling does not happen, unemployment is expected to rise, due to mismatch between skills available and job skills required. However it is predicted that there will be more than enough jobs for the entire workforce.
Now the interesting prediction for India is that there will be 138M new entrants in the job market by 2030. It will not only be required to retain the current labor force in existing jobs but enough jobs have to be created to accommodate these new entrants. The report says, if there are enough and right investments, this mammoth task is achievable.
For these new jobs to be performed, organizations will need to reskill or upskill. One of the recommendations in the report is :” Scaling up job retraining and workforce skill development”, meaning reskilling and upskilling.
Let us take a short break from the report and define jargon that has been repeatedly used here.
While retraining and reskilling are interchangeable terms and mean training for a new way of doing a known job, upskilling is educating for an entirely new job, acquiring a new set of skills altogether.
So in the scenario we started this Blog with, Sheila would be upskilled, Mike re-skilled and Jo could do either depending on how else he can contribute to the Bottling process.
Apart from Governments, Businesses can also certainly help in upgrade of skills, not only for employees of their own organizations but the society they operate in, at large. There is an impending Tsunami of change waiting to happen forced by endless waves of new technologies and our best defense is Education, lifelong learning.
World Economic Forum Research (2018)
https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2018
Corroborating these future outcomes, is another study by the World Economic forum. With respect to reskilling and upskilling they call it an imperative.
One of the key recommendations is :
“A reskilling imperative: By 2022, no less than 54% of all employees will require significant re- and upskilling.”
For this changing labor landscape of the not so distant future, their recommendations are :
Cultivating a learning environment within organizations with opportunities for lifelong learning.
And “investing in human capital and collaborating with other stakeholders on workforce strategy should thus be key business imperatives, critical to companies’ medium to long-term growth, as well as an important contribution to society and social stability.” (page ix)
Reskilling/Upskilling Plan
Considering that we are staring at a mammoth skilling imperative in the face, what can corporates do to equip their employees with the right kind of skills and be prepared for rapid and successful adoptions of high technologies?
Here is a 5-step process that can be implemented to achieve this.
Step 1: Perform a training needs analysis to identify skill gaps (i.e.) employees who need to be reskilled and those that need to be upskilled. There may be a “Either/ Neither” list, like Jo in our example, who can be reskilled or upskilled or neither is possible.
Step 2: Prepare a Re-skilling training plan and an Upskilling training plan
Step 3: Assign employees to appropriate reskilling training or upskilling training; Schedule and conduct training per schedule.
Step 4: Take a look at the Either/Neither group, one person at a time.
· Repurpose skills & reassign to a new position that may have been created (or)
· Upskill, teach a new skill and place in a new position (or)
· Let go.
Step 5: Take a look at unfilled new jobs
Upskill where possible
Hire the rest
Circle back to step 1 periodically: This is very important for continuous engagement of the full employee potential in every organization.
Another important consideration is one of outsourcing this entire process to companies that possess the abundant experience in establishing and cultivating synergies among systems, processes and personnel.
Let me leave you with this very relevant quote from Henry Ford, Founder of Ford Motors and a true visionary.
“The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave, Is NOT training them & having them Stay” -Henry Ford, Founder of Ford Motors- |
[The author is the eLearning Content Head at Ken Interactive, a New Age Learning Company ]
References
2018, World Economic Forum Research (2018)
https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2018
2017, Jobs lost, jobs gained: What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages.
Encyclopedia of Occupational Health and Safety :Chapter 65-Beverage Industry
http://www.ilocis.org/documents/chpt65e.htm
