Recently, we have observed more conversations around Reskilling, Analytics Academy, and Diversity. From a functional standpoint, we discussed the evolution of call centers quite a bit. Also, in focus is the Finance role and what sort of technical capabilities should finance team have. (Google recently said all finance analysts should learn SQL for example).We also had multiple conversations around developing and promoting existing underrepresented talent in the areas of digital marketing, financial analysis, QA testing, and several similar careers. We are not seeing a significant reduction in the workforce, as anticipated in the earlier days of the pandemic. Though companies like Oracle have reported a 6% decline in revenue, as a result of fewer implementations, it has not translated into a broad range of layoffs on the full-time equivalents (impact largely happening with vendor workforce and contingent labor). We are bringing yet another set of insights to you this week.

Several companies are researching how to improve analytics capability across the enterprise.  Specifically, companies are looking at what can be done within the existing infrastructure, For example, if you already use Tableau, what are the AI modules that you can add to expose diverse workforce into AI. From this standpoint, we are seeing many companies thinking about Analytics Learning Academy. Such a learning academy will also train senior VPs and leaders on digital age systems from taking advantage of the rapid innovation. Such academies may also look into the daily digital habits of the enterprise and see how that can be influenced. Doing this over the next 18 months will dramatically impact the analytics capability across your organization.

We are gathering a number of data points around this, and we will be thrilled to do a custom webinar for your company on this topic (if interested).

According to Draup Research, over 68% of the Job Descriptions of Data Scientist role shared by Fortune 500 companies emphasize this skill the preferred requirement of having an experience with the application of core skills in the retail functional domain.  The challenge is these systems are legacy systems and have no proper documentation that exists. This is running new hire talent experience and has about three months of productivity impact.  HR can lead this project from the standpoint of researching and influencing a push for better overall and digital transformation. We have gathered many best practices on this, and we will be sharing the same with you.

We further conducted primary research to show how the transformation of call center agents to the Inside Sales Representative is happening. There are two tracks we have to train. Sales Intelligence and Sales Analytics. These are two different sets of tools and solutions. Sales Intelligence is a bit straightforward than Sales Analytics.  We plan to build a collection of 1000 maps like this in the next 60 days, and we will be sharing the same with you.

Medellin-Colombia is getting several accolades on how it is handling COVID. Very often, the media is consumed by stories like Singapore and South Korea handling their technical prowess, but led by an Engineer Mayor, Medellin has dealt with it really well.  London is preparing for the huge digital demand they are expected to face with the overhaul of many systems and processes.  Earlier this month, UK announced they would be willing to take people from Hongkong- signaling they could very well emerge as the much-coveted Digital Talent Hub position towards the middle of this decade.

Companies like Google and Amazon are targeting visa candidates impacted by non-renewal of the documents in the US and are relocating them to India or Canada. This is another aspect we are studying in detail. Munich and other locations are also in consideration.  We are also considering Dubai to look at what policy changes are evolving as they have a geographical advantage. Dubai may act faster to get digital talent of Indian origin, currently in the US on a work visa

We plan to throw an additional spotlight on diverse talent who have done exceptional work in the areas of science and technology.Here is the spotlight on Jevon Pinard, who is an outstanding talent in IT products. The transitions show that the starting point was a technical support person to all the way a solutions engineer at VMWare all in the span of say 12 years. This is significant career growth, and we are motivated to see this type of transition