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The global MedTech industry is traditionally a high-stakes and high-stress environment. Keeping up with technological advances is an issue faced by 90% of MedTech companies. The global pandemic has also hampered productivity and profits due to economic challenges.
There is a widening skills gap between the top and bottom 25% of the workforce. The bottom quarter costs 97% more than the top quarter as per research. MedTech companies also face pressures to hire specialized talent and onboard newcomers quickly, a challenging task.
For many medical devices companies, attracting candidates requires relooking at the recruiting and retention policies and processes to align their needs with the candidate and employee expectations.
Tightening the Skills Gap in Med Tech Companies
Some MedTech companies are focusing on their workplace as a competitive differentiator to come out on top. Investing time in learning and development can pay dividends in helping companies win and retain the best talent. Let’s see what elements play a role.
Recognizing people as a competitive asset
MedTech companies must commit to investing in human capital. Without people with the right skills powering innovation, your company cannot address the emerging opportunities and leapfrog the competition. Keeping track of the employees’ performance can identify emerging leaders only.
Companies must use tools internally to evaluate both hard and soft skills and future leadership potential. It eliminates bias and delves beyond gender, ethnicity, age, and other biases from the employee pool. Only then can you get an honest and accurate picture of who can help propel your MedTech company to the next level with reskilling.
Fostering soft skills
A successful learning and development exercise considers the need to cultivate a healthy balance of hard skills like analytics, technical knowledge, and performance with soft skills like empathy, communication, and team collaboration.
Today, engineers must spend time with clinicians and patients in the med-tech industry to learn about their experience using the devices to innovate and add features to their product design. They must be comfortable in presenting to multiple lines of business stakeholders.
Their learning and development program must involve soft skills to learn the nuances of presenting technical product features to be viewed credibly.
Accommodating remote learning
In a world where just-in-time development requirements are rife, the management is trying to cater to a distributed workforce. However, we have platforms where talent can access knowledge sessions and leadership training anywhere, with built-in accountability to measure progress.
- MedTech companies must look for solutions offering self-paced, level-specific content and exercises promoting individualized content.
- The training must support active user engagement, offer progress assessments, and measure results.
- Identify a platform that can support active manager involvement, live coaching, and peer-to-peer interaction.
Creating a sense of community is essential in unifying virtual employees, assisting employees in learning and development, building loyalty, and helping retain their leaders.
Tailoring learning to individual needs
As MedTech companies put their new talent through their learning and development, the management must meet their specific needs. The management must reskill high potential candidates through a credible assessment process and begin the individualized talent development because no one-size-fits-all leadership programs can be effective.
In today’s MedTech companies that accommodate remote workers, employees must have a tailored approach to help them new habits based on their individual learning needs. Learning and development must be highly engaging, interactive, and focused on reskilling.
Applying Science to Learning and Development
MedTech companies must use a neuroscience-based learning approach to learning and development. High potential employees can be trained using principles designed to form new, long-lasting habits and optimize skills retention in typical workplace situations.
Neuroscience leverages a ‘practice, reflect, refine,’ methodology allowing employees to focus on developing one skill at a time, leading to retaining information and assimilating better. Learning and development can empower employees to apply these skills to test their skills and receive feedback. Reflecting on that input helps emerging leaders modify and refine skills before moving to the next.
MedTech companies can consider reskilling/upskilling their existing traditional or adjacent talent pool to provide a viable career path to meet the yet unmet demands for new-age roles.
We have identified the MedTech industry’s existing and core skills gaps so that companies can conduct reskilling/upskilling through learning and development programs, including roles prone to disruption.
Here are a few in-demand job roles in the medical devices industry and the location-wise talent distribution. Please note that job roles that can assume the new-age role with reskilling/upskilling.
Developing new leadership skills takes time, practice, and discipline. Management must get actively involved to guide their team members to focus on gaining skills. Applying learning and development programs for reskilling/ upskilling talent in an ever-changing and dynamic industry requires dedication, interaction, and motivation.
Draup has analyzed upwards of 4,500 + across industries. This report provides insights like talent size, top skills in-demand, talent cost, job role future growth, gender diversity, etc. It showcases sample job roles that could be impacted along with reskilling strategies, along with location and talent intelligence.
Draup’s AI-driven reskilling and talent intelligence platform provides insights into the talent market on its dashboard across the entire talent ecosystem, understands the situation, and plans to utilize the insights to benefit the organization.
