The meteoric pace of e-commerce growth and the significant investments the business has attracted in recent times are the hot topics of discussion lately in most business circles. E-commerce business which stood at $2.5 billion in 2009, went up to $6.3 billion in 2011 and is expected to touch a whopping $30 billion by 2016. E-commerce growth in India is expected to be over 50% and will outpace the rest of the global industry with developed markets like the US touching 38% and the UK 34% during this period.
Although even with this rate of growth India?s share of the global industry will be only 1.6% of the global industry, the coming years are going to be exciting as internet penetration levels go up and the clarion call of the Prime Minister of India for ?Digital India? picks up momentum. As a result the number of users making online transactions in India is expected to grow from 11 million in 2011 to 38 million in 2015.
E-commerce has been slow to take off in India due to reasons such as high cash burn and low growth of sales. After a gap of two years when investors were uncertain of the prospects, with the remarkable growth experienced by the industry, there is a renewed optimism about the willingness of Indian consumers to shop online as well as the access for e-commerce they now have through mobile penetration. As a result investments are pouring in with the belief that India as the third largest country behind US and China in internet penetration will experience a long stretch of growth phase in e-commerce.
While the potential of e-commerce has been well accepted and investments are forthcoming, now is the time to turn our attention to examine the talent needs of the industry and gear up for the explosive opportunities the industry will throw up on the technical, domain and management front. According to Forrester?s US Online Retail Forecast 2012-2017, more than 400,000 e-commerce related jobs currently exist in the US and the figure is expected to exceed 500,000 by 2017. Many of these jobs are well paid, salaried roles with long term career growth. These positions are distributed across a variety of different functions ranging from IT to marketing to merchandising and customer experience. This trend will be experienced in India too and B schools can expect a large number of openings for their graduates to come from e-commerce companies.
Since the models of managing business are vastly different in the context of e-commerce, our business dchools should take a fresh perspective of the curriculum taught. Most business dchools teach e-commerce or IT in business as a subject in the business management curriculum. What is needed is a completely redesigned curriculum focussed on ?born on the web businesses? where principles of marketing, customer engagements and relationship building are vastly different from traditional businesses. In the context of e-commerce, we need a new mindset to compete on a platform where the information required for decision making is accessible by all customers and therefore the ability to listen and analyse customer preferences carry a premium.
Subjects such as inventory management and logistics have traditionally been seen as support functions and as such the skills required to manage these functions were mostly to do with adherence to processes related to stocking or distributing items to stockists based on the requirements defined from time to time. Both these areas have become end customer facing and demand capabilities in dynamic modelling, understanding of consumer psychology and granular attention to demand patterns from multiple geographies. In other words, the ability to deal with complex and multifarious data and synthesise to take quick decisions becomes an important ?ask? for e-commerce business. Hence business schools need to focus on building competencies to deal with Big Data and cyber security.
The demand for highly skilled technology specialists conversant with the requirements of e-commerce continues to grow and the talent pool is in perennial short supply. With e-commerce businesses growing rapidly, technology solutions also require constant refinement and innovation. Technology specialists with capabilities in site management, security for e-commerce, content management, order management, business intelligence and merchandising would be most sought after. The demand for statisticians and data scientists will also grow with the imminent surge in data explosion.
E-commerce growth will bring in its wake significant opportunities for self employed professionals like photographers, graphic artists, web designers, videographers, product stylists, fashion designers and content writers. We would need therefore to create high quality training capabilities to build the right skills for these opportunities.
In addition to providing the scope for creating huge employment opportunities, by
design, e-commerce is meant to foster entrepreneurship. With the expanding digital network and the complex Indian market segmented with unique requirements, the opportunity for creating new startups is significant. Instead of such opportunities being restricted to only large cities and for those who are well placed for tapping investments, the immense potential to facilitate e-commerce startups in rural and semi-rural locations to market their own produce or create cooperatives resulting in scaled volumes should be nurtured. We therefore need localised incubation centres and an ecosystem with angle investors interested to invest in e-commerce in the hinterland of India.
Lastly, we need to address two more areas in order to build the right talent pool for e-commerce business. Our education policy planners have to be familiarised with the opportunities for financial inclusion and social equity through e-commerce and therefore the urgency to make necessary interventions in curriculum and teaching pedagogy right from the high school stage. Finally our teachers and trainers have to be well oriented on the emerging trends and about how to consciously nurture two important capabilities in the youth of our country?the analytical acumen and the ability to think out of the box?the key prerequisites that are essential for the success of e-commerce industry.
The writer is CEO, Global Talent Track, a corporate training solutions company