siliconindia | | November 20179Reskill or perish is now the new success mantra for organizations, as it is not only a path to staying productive and profitable, but simply an imperative for survival in the new agecomfortable with the state-of-the-art and engages easily with technology. They have also hired people who have expertise in the technologies that the companies have invested in and the critical know-how to use them optimally.In a country such as India in partic-ular, organizations have been looking to increase their techie manpower as they have added sophisticated hard-ware, software, and communications equipment on their turf. While during the early years of computerization, companies hired IT people such as computer and communications engi-neers, programmers, software archi-tects and maintenance staff. In more recent times, the profile of the tech-nological workforce has undergone a significant makeover.The reason for this is the arrival of the next phase of technological evolution--what we are now refer-ring to as Digital Transformation (DT), or the Fourth Industrial Rev-olution. The reality is that techno-logical disruptions of a greater order than known before are causing com-panies to relook at their employee base and see just how well adjusted it is in terms of existing skills sets to the ongoing Digital environment. As they adopt what is commonly called Industrial 4.0 technologies, com-panies across industries are going through a process of upskilling and re-skilling employees. The large posse of these incom-ing technologies including SMAC (Social, Mobility, Analytics, Cloud), Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial In-telligence, Machine Learning, Robot-ics and Natural Language Process-ing, to name a few, and the changing paradigms of talent deployment, are making reskilling an imperative. En-terprises are therefore preparing their people to seamlessly straddle exist-ing and on-the-horizon technologies so that they can save themselves from obsolescence and contribute to the building of a future-proof and fu-ture-ready workplace.It is true that already many firms in India have established dedicated programs to re-skill existing employ-ees and invested massively on train-ing initiatives. According to IT-BPM industry spearhead and India's lead-ing chamber of commerce, NASS-COM, the country's top companies have already reskilled an average 50 percent of their employee base to fit people for job roles of the future.A research by NASSCOM in fact indicates that the IT-BPM industry, which currently employs around four million people will need an addition-al 1.2-2 billion employees to main-tain existing growth momentum and achieve its targeted revenue goal of $100 billion by 2025. To get here, and in order to keep pace with the automation of the sector, up to 40 percent of the workforce will need to be reskilled in technology, domain, social and thinking.Alongside its enterprise members therefore, NASSCOM has launched an initiative that is aimed at skilling/reskilling 1.5-2 million people (both aspirants and current employees) over the next 4-5 years. The chamber is working with over 20 companies to achieve this target. Additional-ly, NASSCOM has announced the launch of the NASSCOM Leadership Resource Center, a global collabo-rative learning community aimed at building differentiated leadership competencies in future leaders of the industry.Meanwhile, employees within organizations too have become more conscious about reskilling to stay rel-evant. A recent study by global man-agement consultancy firm Accenture on the changes that technology is ex-pected to bring to work over the next five years, has shown that employees are now looking to invest their free time in learning new skills such as technical skills, creativity, people management, ability to work with intelligent machines and judgment & decision-making to stay relevant.It is becoming increasingly clear that reskill or perish is now the new success mantra for organizations. It is not only a path to staying productive and profitable, but simply an imper-ative for survival in the new age. Prakash Menon
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