Jobs are affected, but productivity has increased. The aggressive adoption of cloud-based framework overnight has opened up millions of jobs — jobs that are near recession-proof.

By the end of this year, the untoward partnership of automation and COVID will have affected 8.7 million jobs in the U.S. alone. But, on the bright side, candidates with specializations in artificial intelligence, machine learning, devops, Python, cloud architecture, cybersecurity, and cloud administration will be in high demand for the considerable future. Thanks to COVID.

COVID has impelled the world to readapt at an unprecedented pace. The pandemic has proved that no industry can be resilient enough if workforce strategies are not effectively aligned to meet the demands of the disruption.

Remote working arrangements and work-from-home collaborations have intensified. With 33% of the American workforce working from home, reskilling will be a crucial driving dynamic for organizations across scales, for at least the next three years.

The process of reskilling is easier mooted than executed

Reskilling programs have to be scalable.

It’s not just about having your employees receive accreditations and certifications related to cloud-based specializations, but it’s also about enhancing jobs and profiles across human facing technology such as interface design and human behavioral analysis. This way, organizations get to secure talent that is not only proactive in addressing its immediate (and sudden) needs, but also, more importantly, get to enable its talent into building infrastructures and architectures that are discerning enough to assess the futuristic needs of the organization, and along the way, eventually, reduce emergencies to mere redundancies.

Companies that had earmarked reskilling plans for their employees for the next five years are now being forced to complete the same reskilling programs in the next two years.

As companies are deploying non-uniform applications for providing personalized customer service, the level and intensity of micro services that lead to the customization are bound to increase.

L&D departments have measured results using Learning Management System (LMS), which has attested that learning investments do not necessarily factor into accomplishing business goals.

What this essentially means is, while the cost incurred to reskill employees does not translate to increasing the profits of the company, the need for reskilling continues to rise uninhibitedly — preventing any employee from achieving immunity towards being reskilled.

The skill to reskill

While 74% of organizations firmly believe that in order to survive the pandemic and come out stronger, reskilling is vital, a staggering 64% of organizations are hesitating to commit towards the expeditious shift, despite it being the need of the hour.

The digital assets of an organisation need to be protected at all costs and continue to deliver value.

Large companies like Wipro, Accenture, Zensar, and Infosys, have, since lockdown, invested in Learning Experience Platform (LXPs), adaptive learning and micro-learning systems for their employees.

Adobe is incorporating reskilling programs for its employees to develop robust Adobe cloud-based applications. In order to enforce the upgrade in its workforce strategies, it has partnered with Topcoder, a premier global community of designers, developers, data scientists, and competitive programmers.

In addition to the self-learning curriculum, companies are dedicated to giving their employees a hands-on experience of the company’s services and products, so that employees can contribute towards improving the overall business capabilities of the organization. Some organizations have also given their employees the liberty to choose their own programs (which they think will be helpful for their current profile and future career) and reimburse them towards the costs.

All organizations committed to reskilling are putting bounteous focus on very specific nodes connected to the cloud synapse.

The coming years will be challenging — not just for employees who are being reskilled — but also for employers who are pushing the reskill strategy towards their employees — as the skill of employers in being able to reskill its employees effectively will come to the fore.

The benefit of reskilling is not one-sided

87% of professionals in the millennial generation appreciate their employers appreciating their professional value in their jobs.

Draup understands the invaluableness of this relationship between the employee and the employer. Its Reskilling Navigator tool allows employers to assess and address an employee’s reskilling dimensions based on the employee’s personality traits, technology skills, soft skills, adjacent skills, employee information, engagement guidelines, and hiring opportunity index.

Draup’s Diversity Navigator allows organizations to identify minorities across their companies on the metrics of DRQ (Digitally Replaceable Quotient), diversity, supply & demand growth and talent cost, and accordingly reskill them for on-demand opportunities.

Our Reskilling Tool allows leaders to assign reskilling programs for data engineers, security engineers, cloud platform architects, system administrators, data scientists, and cloud practitioners from AWS, Microsoft, Adobe, and Google Cloud.

Before the pandemic, organizations had the liberty to assess their skill gaps or the talent gap on a periodic basis, which differed anywhere between once a year and at best  — twice a year. Now, the phrase ‘the need of the hour’ holds a whole new league of significance, literally. Organizations have to cohesively and routinely assess the new needs of the company and accordingly address them through reskilling and upskilling its talent  — a continuous and an unavoidable process.