By Kamal Dutta

Even as more and more people are joining the workforce globally, an increasing number of organisations across sectors are witnessing skills gap due to technological advancements. The WEO’s Future of Jobs report noted that 54% of all professionals will require reskilling/upskilling by 2022. Professional roles are evolving, driving the need to change the composition of talent in organisations. The ability to do this fast and cost-effectively is called ‘talent agility’. It considers all the levers needed to build a robust talent pool, including learning and development, acquiring and retaining talent, and employee engagement. In fact, historically, companies saw ‘strategy’ as the most crucial factor for success, but now they realise that retaining the right human capital talent creates the most value.

Continual learning: Technology, business processes, workflows are changing. To stay on top of this change, leaders must encourage a culture of continual learning. Organisations must assess the strengths and weaknesses of their workforce, and devise learning-based interventions.

Growth opportunities: People seek out companies that would help them in their pursuit of excellence. Here, deploying a continual training process can help.

Moulding the employee mindset as per the goals of the organisation can also drive an increase in quality and performance.

Employee engagement: Companies that are boosting talent agility are the ones that are nimble in their approach. They are flexible enough to be open to non-traditional workforce models. Companies must invest in a learning model that is personalised as per the needs of the employees.

Agility is success: Many companies are making continual learning and talent development as a business strategy. Those that provide such opportunities transform into ‘employers of choice’, which, in turn, makes it easy for them to attract and retain top talent. These are the ones that achieve business agility, which is a sure-shot way to succeed in today’s business landscape.

The author is MD India for Skillsoft