FINAL WORD
James McLeod , EMEA Director , Faethm
The first step towards overcoming this barrier is to direct our educational and professional development away from specific roles and instead focus our efforts on improving our overall adaptability .
Of course , each role will have a set of transferable and non-transferable skills , but there is little precedent today for knowing which is which . Identifying skills which sit across different roles means employees can more easily move laterally into new roles as and when is necessary for them to do so .
A new imperative of responsibility for employers
The burden of responsibility for ensuring adaptability may seem to lie with employees , but in reality this imperative applies equally ( if not more ) to employers . Having the right skilled employees working in-house will still contribute significantly to a company ’ s competitiveness , but keeping abreast of demand for new skills by constantly hiring new talent is both a costly and unsustainable strategy . Instead , companies must look inward to retrain and redeploy existing employees in those in-demand roles .
An effective method of identifying which employees should be reskilled is by creating an inventory of skills , taking into account those which are most valuable and those which sit across multiple roles .
This not only effectively eliminates the unpleasant nature and cost of employee redundancies , but by looking at how individual processes translate to value , helps companies eliminate bloated processes and release capacity , simultaneously making roles both more relevant and more efficient .
Carving out the path ahead
The first step towards overcoming this barrier is to direct our educational and professional development away from specific roles and instead focus our efforts on improving our overall adaptability .
Change can often be met with resistance and particularly during periods of uncertainty . Fear of the unknown is an instinct which keeps us alive and out of danger , but we cannot sit back and let it block the path to the future .
We must instead focus on enhancing a very different human instinct – adaptation – to move forward . It is a constant trait of humankind that allows us to thrive and remain resilient , even in the event of sudden changes in the environment . For employers and employees alike , adaptation must take the form of reskilling , which is needed to realise the future of work . All it takes is the will to do things differently . p
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