Understanding Talent Trends & Skillsets to Build A Diverse & Agile Workforce

As 2021 winds down, many HR leaders will be thinking about 2022 and beyond. The center of this thinking will be both Transforming Existing Talent and Hiring talent required for the various digital and transformation initiatives.  The pandemic accelerated our Future of work thinking and continues to impact the way we think about talent.  Even the C-suite leaders who felt strongly about resources having to be in the same building for optimal innovation are now rethinking the strategy.  Companies are learning that as long as the teams have the Psychological Safety of raising the issues and solving them, it does not matter whether they are remote or distributed.   This learning is not necessarily new research.  Amy Edmonson- An American Scholar from Harvard Business School, conducted a fascinating study of high-performing medical teams in 2015.  In the research, professor Edmonson pointed out that high-performing teams are not necessarily high skilled but have the comfort level to raise issues and discuss and resolve as a team.  This term was famously coined as Psychological Safety. It means people can speak up, make mistakes, question things, and raise concerns without humiliation or retribution. Psychological Safety creates a learning organization – a place where teams are more than the sum of their parts, and people go beyond their comfort zones to achieve success together.

When Steve Jobs founded Pixar Animation Studio, Jobs had the audacity to staff the company with Artists and Technologists.  This mix, Jobs believed, will bring out the best products in animation.  In some ways, companies have to understand that the best Digital Talent is a mix of technology and other relevant talents across various functions. Overemphasis on one form of talent (specifically programming Talent) may not set up the company for Digital success.   Diversity in talent (all forms of Diversity is crucial).  Gabrielle Hogan-Brun, the author of the book Linguanomics, states that diverse language trajectories shape overall thinking, and individuals who learn a second language also gain better mental skills.  As a result, Diversity is not just an outside experience – it also refers to the self-enriching learning experience that one must adapt towards 2022 and beyond.

Organizations have a tremendous opportunity to build a distributed-diverse- agile workforce aligned to the objectives.  The time has never been better for HR leaders.  It is truly a Pixar moment for HR!.  Why do we believe so?  Several significant trends are necessitating the Reskilling and the Hiring of certain unique skill sets.  The objective of this week’s email is to highlight the same.  Let us look at them one by one.  We believe that if Recruiters and Workforce Planners understand these trends and the skills associated, you can plan and build a successful organization.

By defining a talent strategy using these developing trends, you can develop a winning Workforce Strategy – a strategy that will help in retention and create new opportunities