Embracing Technical and Cognitive Skills in the Workplace

Featured article by Holly Benson,Vice President and Organizational Transformation Consulting Expert at Infosys

In the last decade, enterprise technology leaders have routinely been given the mandate of understanding their organization’s business operations. That seems reasonable, as the purpose behind most technologies is the support and improvement of business outcomes.

However, business leaders have seldom been given the same directive in being conversant with a company’s technology architecture or operations – creating a precarious disconnect as the role of digital technologies grows across business as a whole.

Today, that dynamic is changing, creating a need for skilled workers who possess a rich combination of technology, business, and cognitive skills. On one hand, the pace of technology and the imperative for disruption are driving a steady stream of technology change across the enterprise, and businesses must prepare employees by continually upgrading and refreshing their technical skills. At the same time, companies must also help employees become flexible in a changing workplace, digest and use massive quantities of data in front-line decision-making, and open up new revenue streams, customer relationships, and product offerings through accelerated creativity and innovation. The challenge of upgrading both “hard” and “soft” capabilities simultaneously is one of the most pressing business issues of the decade.

We will see this challenge take center stage in 2017 as enterprises seek the balance between “hard” technical and “soft” cognitive skills within their workforces.

Developing “Hard” Technical Skills

Continuing trends in automation, artificial intelligence and advanced analytics mean that skills sets once considered advanced by anyone outside of IT are becoming essential for the day-to-day work of many employees across the business. However, ensuring that enough employees have the requisite technical knowledge and abilities presents a serious challenge. For many companies, three primary concerns have emerged on how to address the growing technology skills gap – the need to have an adequate foundation in basic technology skills, and the challenge of keeping pace with new skills as technologies evolve.

To address the first concern, basic technology skills must be established either in pre-employment education (ideally K-12 and university), or in special foundational programs for entry-level recruits. Hiring managers should determine whether new or potential employees have the necessary technical skills and background when entering the company, and if not, direct them into an onboarding training program that ensures the proper technical foundation is put in place. By standardizing these programs during the onboarding process, businesses can give employees a platform for continuous technical growth. In addition, as many companies are now doing, companies should look for ways to impact what the educational system is producing, particularly at the local level. Forward-thinking firms are forming partnerships with community leaders and educators to increase the availability and quality of computer education – including among disadvantaged groups for whom technology offers a powerful path to economic self-sufficiency.

The second and more challenging concern is the need for continuous evolution of employees’ technical skills. Younger “digital natives” – the tech savvy generations that have been in constant touch with technology since their childhoods – are often keenly aware that technologies are evolving much faster than corporate learning programs. They see that innovators are generating new technologies and companies are onboarding new solutions far faster than standard training functions are uplifting employee skillsets or updating corporate curricula. While these employees are often resourceful and aggressive about finding self-directed learning opportunities, companies who hope to retain them for the long haul must invest to give them clear paths to regular technical skill updates.

The gap between the availability of technology and workforce preparedness is even more dramatic for older generations of more established employees who are “digital immigrants” – late-comers to the digital world. In order for them to remain viable in the digital workplace, they must acquire the knowledge to handle new and evolving technologies. To help them down this path, companies must invest proactively to upgrade their skills – in some cases, extensively. Both of these challenges require ongoing education and training programs designed to identify changing business needs and even anticipate what new skills will be required.

A third and still more vexing concern is what to do with employees who are permanently displaced by automation and AI. Not only is there a net decrease in the number of employees required in the digital world, but also many in this displaced group are unskilled or low-skilled workers who simply do not have the education or experience to take on higher-end technology-enabled job functions. Call them “digital refugees”, this is the group that often sees a permanent decline in employability and income levels. Government and other public sector leaders are becoming more vocal about the need for corporations to shoulder some of the burden for repositioning workers permanently displaced by automation and AI – a perspective not entirely palatable to many corporate leaders for obvious reasons. However, corporate leaders can expect this discussion to escalate as the trend continues, and those that can offer innovative approaches or public/private sector partnerships to provide solutions may avoid both negative PR and more forced remedies.

Fostering “Soft” Cognitive Abilities

Keeping current with emerging technologies in any field is a table stakes requirement, and educating business leaders on technology is a growing imperative. At the same time, teaching analysis, decision-making and people-management skills will also become increasingly important in large corporations as the rate of evolution within the enterprise accelerates. Programs to develop complex cognitive skills and approaches like design thinking, strategy, and even meditation and mindfulness, will need to expand and become more common to ensure that employees develop the cognitive and emotional skills necessary to deal with the future workplace.

“Soft skills” such as emotional intelligence and cognitive flexibility both help employees adapt to the shifting needs of the marketplace, and bolster their ability to cope with near-constant change. Moreover, these non-technical skills help fuel the innovation, creativity and collaboration within organizations that power growth. If companies hope to attract and retain the highly valuable individuals who excel in these areas, they will need to restructure outmoded processes and cultures that stifle experimentation and ingenuity. They must also increase investments in learning and offer better, richer working environments that combine extensive online learning opportunities with targeted classroom-based education and coaching to hone interpersonal and cognitive abilities.

Finding a Balance

More and more companies are wrestling with how to ensure both efficiency and scale on one hand, and creativity and innovation on the other. The underlying and difficult reality is that the structures and environments which optimize efficiency, scale and cost are in many ways antithetical to those which promote creativity and innovation. How to nurture both simultaneously, in one organization, is one of the greatest leadership and organizational design challenges of the decade.

In parallel, companies are similarly seeking ways to balance spiraling needs for both “hard skills” and “soft skills” upgrades in their work force. This is a second, deep dichotomy to be managed – in an era of shrinking training budgets, increased pressure on productivity, rising levels of employee change fatigue, and diminishing employee loyalties. While there is no guaranteed path for businesses to create a system of both “hard” and “soft” skill development, choosing to ignore either dimension is a sure path to failure; gaps will impact everything from customer service, to productivity, to talent attraction and retention. As a result, enterprises need to create a culture in which employees are expected to continuously upgrade their skills portfolio, have abundant opportunities to do so, and are rewarded for taking advantage of those opportunities.

Holly Benson is a Vice President and Organizational Transformation Consulting expert at Infosys, a next-generation IT services provider.