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Digitalization has caused career pivots for entertainment professionals, encouraging companies to invest in various tech functions.
- The M&E industry is acquiring skilled workers in tech and non-tech roles globally.
- M&E companies are competing with competitors across various tech roles.
Companies are trying to find optimal ways to retain their tech talent and focus on long-term sustainability.
- M&E companies must reskill/upskill disruption-prone workforce into in-demand roles like Data Engineer.
- Companies are saving up to 50% of the cost compared to acquiring talent externally.
- Shanghai, London, Beijing, Bengaluru, and Paris are among the top cities with talent availability.
This report covers top locations to hire talent and includes talent size, top skills, in-demand roles, cost, and gender diversity in those locations. It provides information on reskilling disrupted/digitally impacted job roles.
Although media & entertainment companies are increasingly technology-driven, people drive growth, innovation, and revenue. Competition for elite talent has always been fierce.
According to a survey, organizations in Media & Entertainment, Telecommunications, and Technology (TMT) consider hiring and maintaining qualified talent as the key to success.
Most IT CFOs (81%) are working on or planning to increase headcount in the coming year. 71% of CFOs said spending more on HR/talent will help their strategy succeed. Most talent management will require innovation and new talent strategies even with more budget.
Taking Inspiration From Tech Workforce Strategies
It is known that TMT sectors pioneered technologies that extended to other industries for acquiring, training, and using talent. Companies will continue to maximize resources, time, and people in the 2020s.
Assessing the technology sector’s current challenges and strategies may shed light on other industries’ future. According to a new study, organizations want to add staff, automate procedures, and use Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
Similar methods exist in the media & entertainment business. Rising data relevance, for example, demands additional talent or upskilling existing employees.
Let us look at numerous challenges companies face worldwide, including overcoming them.
Engaging with millennials
Changing demographics requires combining generations with various values and work styles. Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials all view work, communication techniques, and work-life balance differently.
By 2025, millennials will be 75% of the workforce. They’re more likely to resign after two years. Millennials appreciate personal and professional growth, purpose, quality management, and advancement. Talent management must prioritize such demands.
Increased time spent on feedback, career planning, and community may help organizations retain talent. Incentive structures are often outdated.
Most employees work in teams and on projects, but leadership, job, and compensation systems don’t reflect this. Talent management might want to connect bonuses or time off to group performance, measured monthly, quarterly, or yearly.
Competition for a scarce resource
Demographic challenges are thinning talent pools and raising competition for skilled employees. A survey stated that eight out of ten Fortune 500 executives and SMEs stated their companies struggle to recruit and retain talented workers.
One solution for talent management is integrating organizational values and culture into hiring, training, and promotion and adding significance and value to every aspect of the workplace.
Instead of integrating technology to reduce headcount, talent management must focus on enabling people to focus on areas they are enthusiastic about and where they can positively impact company performance.
Mainstreaming ‘Alternative’ Workforce
A survey indicated that 55 million Americans are freelancers, 16% of the population.
Alternative labor is mainstream.
Companies increasingly rely on freelancers, although most hire them project-by-project, with many benefits.
Ad-hoc freelancers help organizations control expenditures in real time. It eliminates short-term workforce issues, offers more flexibility, and lowers total expenses, which might be advantageous in M&A times.
Few talent management teams are establishing programs to maximize freelancers’ long-term value-add. Alternative workforce initiatives could include training programs and established processes for hiring freelancers on part-time or full-time contracts.
Organizations may lose important freelancer experience without such protocols if they discover better chances elsewhere. New technical solutions, such as workforce management suites, can help firms manage hourly workers.
Upskilling workforce efficiently
In an evolving market, the workforce needs lifelong learning. Upskilling or reskilling existing staff is a high priority for talent management. Media, entertainment, and telecom companies face a shortage of 4.3 million workers by 2030.
Organizations encounter many challenges. Making time for planned training programs often reduces work and training efficiency. Scheduling group lessons is difficult. New, adaptable means of training and skill-building are needed.
In healthcare, virtual human patients are used to develop soft skills and diagnose. Management and HR are following suit.
Managers can practice firing Barry, a VR human figure. VR and remote training will likely rise in the future years.
In both cases, new technology allows learners to fit courses and case study work into their schedules.
Staying ‘Human’
In the past few years, skilled employees have gained negotiating power. Media and entertainment must adapt to this new norm like all industries.
Companies must modify their procedures and tactics to deal with rising competition for qualified workers, changing workforce demands, lifelong learning, and alternative workforce aspects.
They must also consider gender diversity, inclusivity of the differently abled and LGBTQ+
Human connections are key to attracting and maintaining talent because people drive growth, innovation, and revenue.
Keeping the human factor in interactions, culture building, finding and retaining talent, and everyday management will be a challenge for talent management in the coming decade.
Upskilling Talent with Disrupted Roles to Mitigate Talent Disruption
Legacy media and entertainment companies are experiencing tremendous growth. Walt Disney has increased investments in IT and engineering departments by 1% and 3% in 2018 alone.
There is another reason why tech-based entertainment companies like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, grew by more than 150% in the past five years. There is a lot of tech talent flocking to these companies.
Besides, tech skills are transferable. Hence, the media and entertainment industry must reskill their existing workforce to equip them for a digital age and retain their employees.
Draup analyzed the future of tech-related talent in the media and entertainment industry. The report covers top in-demand skills, role growth, talent experience split, location intelligence, gender diversity, etc.
It demonstrates reskilling options for disrupted job roles for talent management to offer a career path. We used the ‘Data Engineer’ role to illustrate how talent management can assist employees in assuming this role and advancing to senior roles over time.
Let us look at some skills to traverse from Data Administrator to Data Engineer and become job ready within 5 to 6 months.
- Data Engineering and Analytics – Business intelligence, data warehousing, and data integration
- Programming – Python, Java, Tableau, Hadoop
- Database – Oracle SQL for data analytics
Successful reskilling programs will help media and entertainment companies preserve their business edge. Talent management teams may use AI-powered talent intelligence tools like Draup to identify new-age roles with data-backed insights.
Draup helps firms migrate to in-demand roles by mapping skillsets to courses in its database using 100+ machine learning models, enabling enterprises to construct reskilling campaigns for a new-age pharma workforce.
