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With the incremental growth of remote working in the post-COVID era, the demand for Program Management professionals across all domains is expected to rise drastically in the upcoming years. Hence, hiring and reskilling for Program Management roles will soon become a necessity.
During COVID-19, the uninterrupted deliveries of strategic and digital transformation programs were only possible due to strategic coordination and precise goal settings amongst the project resources in the remote working setup.
Program Management professionals are becoming highly critical to drive enterprise-wide programs, especially in remote/hybrid work environments. Some of the prime reasons for the demand of Project Managers include:
- To manage the increased number of backlogged projects paused due to COVID-19.
- For efficient remote project allocation and resource management.
- To ensure timely delivery of critical projects for program continuation.
- To meet program goals with quality even with a downsized budget.
An Overview of Program Management during COVID-19
During the pandemic, Program Managers used multiple tools and technologies to navigate through the pandemic, including collaboration tools, project tracking tools, scheduling software, and workflow automation tools. Different tools, technologies, and methods came to rescue a majority of organizations during the pandemic.
The advent of advanced Program Management solutions in the pandemic was inevitable. With the rapid increase of digital use cases across cloud, AI & cyber security domains over multiple industries, successful Program Management strategies are expected to drive the digitalization movement in the coming decade.
This digitalization is also further giving rise to new trends such as:
- Hybrid program management approaches
- Integration of AI and automation
- Rise of cloud storage and cloud applications
- Greater reliance on remote working archetypes
- Partnering with customer success teams
- Increased focus on analytics and numbers
As Industries recover from the pandemic and accelerate their digital transformation strategies, many Program Management roles are emerging across different business functions. However, there are chances of a potential shortage of PM talent that needs to be addressed. This will likely be caused by a sudden surge in demand for Program Managers, and hiring and reskilling for Program Management roles will become necessary.
Location intelligence and hiring insights for the role
Targeted hiring strategies in the remote working setup are imperative for companies across industries to meet the surge in current demand for Program Managers. Hiring for Program Management roles will soon be met by a talent shortage due to the increased demand for PM talent. With the pandemic now subsiding, organizations are aggressively hiring Program Managers to accelerate the pace of implementing their future digital programs.
With the high propensity of PMs to work remotely, companies have now started leveraging the global Program Manager talent pool based on their requirements.
Please download the full report to access detailed insights on location intelligence.
Reskilling strategies for “Program Manager” role
The future demand-supply gap of ‘Program Manager’ talent is expected to increase exponentially as companies across traditional industries adopt Agile processes in their digital transformation journey. In a state like this, reskilling for Program Management roles should be rapidly adopted and implemented across the organization.
The Program Manager talent distribution and dynamics across Industries are expected to change due to the following reasons:
- Increasing adoption of Agile Project/ Program management approach.
- Accelerated digital transformation across traditional sectors.
- Adoption of Agile frameworks in non-technical projects/ programs.
- Increasing demand for technical products/services from end customers.
- Increasing competition for technological supremacy.
To meet the unmet hiring demand of PM talent, organizations can consider reskilling/upskilling disrupted job roles with the required skills. This will provide a viable career path for over 1.37 Mn disrupted roles and save anywhere between 20-50% of the cost compared to external recruitment.
As a ‘Program Manager’ role being at the center of a company’s overall ecosystem, reskilling/upskilling can effectively train the existing talent pool to meet the increasing demand of PM professionals.
Existing senior employees in the respective domain, if reskilled/upskilled for PM, can add better value than externally hired PMs due to their acquaintance with the company’s vision, culture, and overall ecosystem.
Case Study: Upskilling for Sales Enablement Program Manager
A traditional job role such as ‘sales operations Manager’ can be upskilled into a ‘sales enablement Program Manager’ role with Agile framework knowledge, training skills, and project management skills.
For this to happen, the transition has to go through a process that includes identifying:
- Skills needed for the new role
- The skills gap between the new and previous role
- Feasibility of transitions based on relevant reskilling/upskilling parameters
- Suitable learning modules to facilitate reskilling/upskilling and bridge the skills gap.
Identifying each element in the list above and preparing a path to facilitate this transition is essential. Let us try preparing an upskilling path from a sales operations manager to a new-age sales enablement program manager.
In a period of 4-6 months, backed by specific courses/certifications, a sales operations Manager can transition into a sales enablement Program Manager.
With rapid deployment and new solutions coming up, the modern working ecosystem is expected to disrupt existing skills across all experience levels very shortly heavily.
Reskilling is the need of the hour across all industries staring at an exponential talent gap in developing and managing critical programs/projects.
Enterprises that choose to move with targeted hiring and custom reskilling would be less likely to face a talent shortage in the coming future.
Draup is an AI-powered talent management platform that delivers HR leaders with data-backed insights into the global talent pool, cost modeling, and reskilling pathways suitable to manage talent faster and drive company-wide reskilling initiatives or hire quality talent.
