It is time to rewrite the story of Eklavya and Dronacharya. Eklavya was a mythological character in the Mahabharata. He was a commoner who was denied the opportunity to learn archery from Dronacharya — the royal teacher. The unfazed Eklavya went back to the forest and built a statue of the guru and began practising archery. The self-taught archer became as skilled as the princes who were being taught by the master. This is where the story needs to be updated.
The future belongs to experts. Build deep expertise in your field whether you are a data scientist, security analyst, product manager, marketing manager or UI designer. Bring skills from other disciplines like design, data analysis and business acumen to your field of expertise. Those are the jobs that are harder to automate. You can automate say the data crunching, but it is harder to automate the role of a Data Scientist who is a brilliant designer and storyteller. They are "hybrid jobs".
We often ask children what they want to be when they grow up. 85 per cent of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven't even been invented yet. There were no jobs called Data Scientist, YouTube star, Sports Psychologists, even a few years back. The educational institutions have to stop being credentialing machines. My take on the Adobe Education Leaders Seminar 2019 ...
We can no longer tell a first-time workforce entrant to find a stable job. The job market is in a state of “perpetual beta”. There are sectors and organizations that are collapsing because of new business models. Jobs are getting unbundled and being looked at as a set of skills. Some of these skills will be automated. Some skills will be done by humans. Definitely, constant skill upgradation is the new norm.
Ever noticed how in most organizations the leaders rarely join workshops and training events. They will sit at the back, doing their email. That signals to the team that they do not need to learn all this, but they are joining the workshop just to encourage the team. This is patronizing and tells the participants, the new ideas will not be implemented because the leaders have not accepted their own need to learn and accept new ideas.Even now, in most organizations, the learning opportunities are segmented by hierarchy rather than learning needs. The seniors feel embarrassed to attend the same workshop that their team members are attending. It’s a sign of an antiquated mindset when leaders project themselves to be “beyond learning”. They will not be the role models employees need to stay curious and humble — two qualities that help a person to learn.
"68% employees want to learn at the workplace. They can learn at their own pace and they also want to learn what they can put to use in solving a workplace problem. In a world where skills take time to learn and yet keep becoming obsolete, the talent developers have to balance the needs for today and future. The organizations survival depends on that." Soft skill development is done better by face to face interactions - not on devices. Soft skills need other human beings to be learned. So don't expect changes by putting all employees through some e-learning course or stuff taught through a device.
Formal training is like the conducted tour of a city you can take. Informal learning is like the experience of sauntering around a city’s by-lanes exploring, stopping to talk to strangers and sampling what strikes your fancy. L&D teams can do both. They do not have to choose.
Creating low end jobs is not going to be sustainable. Machines will outperform us every time. It may be hard to build the capability at scale to build techies with deep expertise in Artificial Intelligence. As machines take over from humans, all that is left is creativity and the ability to manage human relationships. That is what India excels at. Instead, India needs to leverage the strengths that it has. It is a culture where relations matter. This is not to take away from the need to build deep tech skills, but to supplement it with something that we may have an advantage in. How do we handle the impact of the 3 factors? Read on...
