This week I had the privilege of discussing 2023 skills planning with various global HR leaders.  Overall the sentiment is such that there is a lot of work with reskilling, resizing, automation, and hiring across different workforce segments.  The year 2023 skills planning is extremely critical.  We are contacting all of you to see if we can conduct a 45-minute workshop around this.  If you are interested, please let us know, and we will schedule it.

Modern Historian Yuval Noah Harari presented at Nordic Business Council Meeting two weeks ago.  In this meeting, Harari mentioned that the most important skill is the Mental Flexibility to master new skills well into the 59s, the 60s, and 70s of one’s life.  This skill, called Mental Flexibility, is critical to pay attention to.  Another skill highlighted in the forum is the ability to gather new information and make sure we can differentiate between reliable and unreliable information.  In the big data world, this has become important.

The world has become very connected.  For an enterprise, it is no longer whether global locations (or locations other than the headquarters in the same country) are critical.  All locations are strategic to an enterprise.  We are already exchanging IPs and intangible assets across global locations.  Let us look at the following powerful graph published by the World bank.  The World Bank publishes a graph on Intangibles.  Intangibles are Charges for the use of intellectual property that are payments and receipts between residents and nonresidents for the authorized use of proprietary trademarks (such as patents, trademarks, copyrights, industrial designs, etc.).  If a company in Norway uses a patent from the United States, the fees associated is tracked.  The graph shows how connected the world has become.  In the last 20 years, this metric has grown exponentially.  So there is no dispute that we live in a connected world.

In a connected world with rapid digital transformation, we have added the dimensions of resizing to the equation. This week Frontier Airlines made a bold call that they will have no voice-based call center for customer support, and all support will be through social channels.   HR should aggressively get ready with all the necessary frameworks.  The goal will be to develop a framework as follows.  For each of the workforce segments, what are the specific lever specific activities we could undertake?  (Here, I am referring to the levers of Reskilling, Automation, Hiring, Resizing, and Diversity.  We recently worked on a framework across critical workforce segments, and the objective was to get very specific on the skills.  Please be advised that this is a framework, and your enterprise’s exact model may be slightly different.

The diversity in this framework is viewed more holistically (across different talent categories).

Using this framework, Draup can develop workforce simulation scenarios for review.  The role of the Recruiter is paramount in the journey.  Here are specific areas where recruiter insights will be critical

• Play a key role in backfill in ensuring the replacement talent is highly innovative and transformative
• Assist in providing detailed research point of view on diversity categories vs. skills available
• New channels of talent across GitHub, Stack Overflow, gig talent, and other new avenues of talent.  Proactively build a database of talent
• Understand what resonates from EV proposition and document the trends across industry peers and skill peers
• Interview existing talent in the company to document emerging areas in tech and digital
• Develop a point of view around costs to understand how the market is shifting
• And, of course, continue in the valuable recruiting of great talent