Ready to Compete for Prized Talent

Skills and Jobs of the Future

Ready to Compete for Prized Talent

How, then, can your business get out in front in defining and securing your future skills needs?

1. Plan Talent Needs Around Disruptive Trends

In defining your skills needs, it’s important to keep track of emerging developments, such as your customer expectations, as well as technology advancements.

You can then evaluate the opportunities and disruptive threats that might be present.

Where are customer expectations heading? What opportunities does emerging technology offer your business? What capabilities do you need to capitalise on?

You might not know what those skills are, or they may not have a job title just yet. However, you can map out potential scenarios and develop feasible options to address them.

For example, if you are running a logistics company, consider the type of skills your employees would need if your warehouse becomes mostly AI-operated and your fleet moves to semi or fully autonomous vehicles. This would help you project the type of essential skills your business would need to survive and sustain in the new normal.

Where are customer expectations heading? What opportunities does emerging technology offer your business? What capabilities do you need to capitalise on?

You might not know what those skills are, or they may not have a job title just yet. However, you can map out potential scenarios and develop feasible options to address them.

Again, this is not completely new and we are already making small and incremental steps towards optimising efficiency. UPS’ gives each driver a specific route to follow and that includes a policy that drivers should never turn toward oncoming traffic unless absolutely necessary.

This is all processed by a very thorough vehicle routing software to reduce the chances of an accident and to cut delays caused by waiting for a gap in the traffic, which could lead to fuel waste.

HR teams should also be closely involved in planning for the future. If you find you have to play catch-up in five years, the talent you need could be prohibitively expensive to hire. Furthermore, if you do not bring forward your hiring plans, the capabilities of your existing workforce will start to fade and eventually expire. It is hence important to get people in jobs fast, particularly in areas that are high in-demand, and it is also crucial that your employees have the basic knowledge they need to have to operate in. Upskilling and re-training them for their future responsibilities would then be much cheaper and manageable.

“The nature of jobs and work tasks will change, and HR has a key role to play in managing these transitions and ensuring that new job roles align with employee knowledge, skills and abilities, and the organisation’s strategic position,” said Dr Justine Ferrer, current senior lecturer in human resource management at Deakin Business School.

2. Hire for Adaptability

A lot of your future skills needs have yet to emerge. Others could quickly become redundant before you even know it.

Think about your traditional tellers in bank branches where you’d normally go to deposit or withdraw cash for personal use when you were much younger. They’ve been slowly (and surely) replaced by automated teller machines. As we move towards being a cashless society, such automated teller machines will also be less of a frequent sight.

What will happen to the bank tellers? They will have to be redeployed to other functions within the bank where their skills and experience would be useful, such as becoming a customer experience specialist where they can continue to interact with customers via online platforms.

The agile mindset that enables people to acquire fresh knowledge and adapt to constant change could, therefore, be more important than any specific skill.

In an interview for Randstad’s “Standing Out” series, Carlos Gonzaga, head of human resources at Deutsche Bank Italy said, “It doesn’t matter how good an economist the candidate is or how strong their technological skills are if they don’t have the capacity to adapt, as their skills will soon become obsolete.”

Deutsche Bank has set up dedicated assessment centres to help identify and select these nimble-minded recruits. “We look at how people perform within a group dynamic, how well they develop relationships and how effective they are at solving problems. It soon becomes clear which people have what it takes,” said Mr Gonzaga.

3. Engage Early to Build a Talent Pool for the Future

You could engage with budding AI specialists or other prized talent long before they graduate or be an active member of your local startup community.

While large companies have the resources to plan and host innovation launchpads, smaller firms can play friendly and create small communities to interact and exchange ideas through fireside chats or virtual events.

Conferences such as Google I/O or Singapore Fintech Fest have thousands of participants every year. Not only will you be able to establish valuable connections with new talent from these events, you can also keep yourself up-to-date with the latest developments and upcoming trends.

Scouting talent should never be a responsibility that solely lies on the hiring manager. HR professionals should also participate in such activities to familiarise themselves with what employees are looking for in an employer and proactively scout for talent for their internal pipeline. The audience isn’t just the people you want now, but students and people working for competitors who can be your potential recruits for the future.

Skills and Jobs of the Future

Begin Building for the Future Today

The skills you need in ten, even five years could be very different from today.

You can’t always predict what these in-demand skills will be, but you can still prepare. The more you plan and develop from within, the less you’ll have to play catch-up in the near future.

An individual’s adaptability and the focus on regular upskilling needed to keep skills current could be more important than any specific capability in this fast-moving and volatile environment.
Your super skill should be the ability to spot emerging trends and what this means for your business and its workforce.

Early talent engagement and having a compelling employer brand will put you on the front foot in reaching out to new and different types of talent as demands evolve – allowing you to stay competitive regardless of market challenges.

Part 2

Looking Further Ahead