In the age of rapid digital transformation, Experimentation is very crucial.  Thomas Alva Edison once said that the real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into twenty-four hours.  Human Resources should plan, design, and run experiments in 2022 for optimal labor and reskilling strategies.  History has some great examples outlining the power of Experimentation.  In 2012, the Lotus F1 team surprised many observers with its success in first Formula One season.  Even with smaller budgets, Lotus achieved this.  How did they do it?  Before the season, Lotus loaded all race track characteristics into an in-house simulator.  Lotus viewed this as a crucial experiment in preparation.  Any small change in performance was studied and driver feedback incorporated for every test.  Design changes were recommended, and they incorporated well over 30,000 changes and perfected the racing conditions well before the actual race.  Such is the power of experiments.  Experiments can fail at times as well.  But it is important to fail soon and learn from them.

This email is about a few experiments that Human Resources can attempt perfecting in 2022.  A win in any of these experiments will help companies perfect their labor and recruitment strategy

Within each domain, specific skills are commanding a premium.  Perfecting this model will help organizations narrow down them valuing particular skills instead of a role level premium.  For example, when you look at Machine Learning, the following graph shows the cost order of skills (high to low).  Studying each domain and understanding the skills of each domain will be a helpful exercise for any enterprise.  This experiment can also inform the reskilling and learning strategy

A few new-age Soft Competencies are emerging in the industry.  We studied over 1 million recent job descriptions and ran a cluster analysis to arrive at distinct Soft Competencies.  Not a perfect model, but it gives you a directional idea.  This will ensure we capture and train the workforce towards new-age soft competencies.  New areas like Eco-sustainability competence are beginning to emerge, and it will be critical for enterprises to understand the same

We are beginning to see companies opening more remote jobs in relatively smaller hubs, for Example, Montreal in Canada.  Compared with Toronto, Montreal has more remote job postings proportions. Tapping nearby hubs for remote and understanding the functional characteristics will be a beneficial experiment for enterprises to run.

Especially in the areas of Cloud Security and Cloud Support, Enterprises are not creating enough early career roles.  This impacts proper pipelining and companies end up struggling with executing their digital priorities.  Creating more early career roles will demand more management bandwidth but will help you build the pipeline in mission critical roles (highlighted in dotted red boxes below)