With the number of cases going up across the world, many companies are discussing about shifting the planned real estate dollars to Digital Initiatives. This may mean more opportunities for talent development and reskilling. Draup presented at a virtual conference on talent intelligence and reskilling through HR.com. We had well over 315 attendees and got to hear some interesting questions.

The questions that were posed to us can be classified in 4 categories

• Do we expect the migration of talent to smaller cities across the globe?  How should enterprises react if this starts happening?
• Will the perception gap between non-traditional learning and traditional university learning change – now that even universities have started looking more like online courses?
• What new roles are coming up post Covid19?
• How are companies approaching Reskilling?

While we do not have concrete evidence on aspects like people migration, many theories are evolving around this, the housing crisis in many large cities may force talent to migrate. This is applicable for all large cities such as the Bay area, London, Seattle, Tokyo, and NCR Region. This has nothing to do with COVID, but an issue that has been evolving for a while, and now people see a viable solution due to Remote first. The emerging view on immigration also has an influence on this.  Companies like Google are hiring people impacted by immigration paperwork and offering them jobs in their home countries.  In as much as Digital adoption has improved, we are still not there.  We still do not have the proper technology to conduct large group meetings. We have data now to say that online meeting effectiveness is questionable for greater than 15 people attending. The coordination required to host large group meetings is still being addressed and solved.

We see that many new roles are being discussed. Some not fully in the market but concepts being discussed, which you may find interesting in this remote-first – human-machine world.  We have given our best interpreted descriptions for these roles.

• Corporate disorganizer
  • Larger companies want to be more like successful startups, seeing innovation as important for future profits. Corporate disorganizers will introduce a little “organized chaos,” to tap into new systems of collaborative economy and create fragmentation for more distribution.
• Algorithm bias auditor
  • With the expected increase of AI use in businesses, it is essential to ensure that the algorithms driving the AI are fair, legal, and representative of the values of companies. An algorithm bias auditor conducts reviews of systems within the organization and establishes an inventory that logs and tracks each algorithm, its objectives, and output. They also develop guidelines and compliance methodologies that can be easily understood and followed by employees in an organization.
• Machine risk officer
  • As artificial intelligence becomes part of everyday life, it will present unknown challenges. From biased and unexpected results to dangerous errors, the unintended actions of intelligent machines will have to be addressed. Machines risk officers will have to manage the potential risks that can occur when intelligent machines fail. This position requires the establishment of human-machine trust and the skills to protect a company’s brand, reputations and finances by considering machine ethics issues.
• Data trash engineer
  • Data trash engineers turn useless data or “junk data” into potential insights. They identify unused data, clean it up, and feed it into machine-learning algorithms to find hidden ideas by not only increasing how much data is collected, but also improving the data quality.  

As we complete more projects on Reskilling and successful stories emerge, we are beginning to understand the importance of Organizational buy-in. Personally, for a person who relied more on models and mappings, this is a significant learning.  You have to set up a proper executive committee and working group committee and communicate the plan, test, prototype and scale aspects of the processes on a very frequent basis.  Having internal SMEs, validate the reskilling paths is supremely important. We are planning to add elements of this into the platform itself.  So for each job role, we have to go through a gatekeeping process.