Retail Industry Digitalization: How can HR Help ?

Retail 4.0 is driven by the automation of traditional business functions such as inventory management, purchase, customer service in the Retail Sector. This transformation requires retail companies to build a strong digital framework with new-age capabilities like IoT, AI/ML, RPA, Blockchain, etc

Organizations are realizing the challenges related to the talent as they invest into these digital initiatives:

• Hiring skilled talent in New-age technologies: Challenge to acquire digital skills as every enterprise is hunting for the same digital skills for their digitization initiatives.
• Traditional retail talent becoming obsolete: Digital use cases have also led to the redundancy of traditional retail workforce across business functions such as inventory management.

Reskilling framework built with the use of micro and macro learning course modules will help HR leaders address both the digitization talent challenges. Courses focused on Data Analysis, Statistical modelling, visualization, etc. are vital to reskilling traditional retail talents into new-age careers.

Companies are structuring the framework efficiently based on skill-gap analysis that can tailor the training programs for every talent in the organization to undergo a smooth transformation.

A traditional Inventory Associate can transition to Inventory Specialist:

• Inventory Associate
  • Target Role: Inventory Analyst / Specialist
    • Courses: Data Analytics (Udemy)
    • Skills acquired: Data Analysis, Microsoft Excel, Statistical software such as SAS and SPSS

With ideal learning modules, a legacy IT infrastructure Architect can be reskilled to become a Cloud DevOps Analyst to handle cloud-enabled applications and monitor security issues.

• IT Infrastructure Architect
  • Target Role: Cloud DevOps Analyst
    • Courses:  AWS Fundamentals: Going-Cloud Native (Coursera) + Docker Courses (Udemy)
    • Traditional Skills: Linux, PowerShell, Bash, Server Configuration
    • Skills Acquired: Docker, Azure.

HR Leaders are constantly devising L&D programs to reskill legacy retail workforce with the latest digital skills and the functionalities of each technology deployed within the firm. Enterprises are tailoring holistic skill-development strategies to prepare and strengthen its talent force to sustain in this next-gen retail transformation.