I recently had the fantastic opportunity to join a panel of dynamic leaders from around the globe for the Horasis Extraordinary Meeting. The Horasis Extraordinary Meeting is a community of industry and state leaders focused on enacting visions for a sustainable future. The anchor of our panel, “Industry 4.0: From Initiative to Imperative,” was global innovation and the development of sustainable emerging markets, and in it, I shared how Talent Intelligence is a critical linchpin that will unlock the ability of companies and countries to transition into the future of work successfully.
In addition to myself, the session included business leaders:
- Michele Mosca, Co-Founder, IQC, CEO of evolutionQ
- Ilídio de Ayala Serôdio, President of the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Indonesia
- Viren Joshi, Chief Executive Officer and President of Sigma Electric
- George Fomitchev, CEO of Endurance Lasers
- Gustavo Ghory, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Kimberly-Clark and Co-Founder SmarterChains SA
I greatly enjoyed the conversation and everyone’s insights. While our experience and backgrounds greatly differed, two key points surfaced throughout the discussion around building economic resilience. First was the need to embrace, adopt and implement new technologies. The second was the need to future-ready the workforce with new and emerging skills to keep pace with new technological developments. Everyone was nodding their heads in agreement when Viren Joshi said, “If we don’t aggressively implement new technologies and upskill the workforce, companies will not succeed and flourish. Countries will not succeed and flourish.”
Each panelist shared how the global pandemic laid bare our weakness as companies, industries, and nations and hyper-accelerated the need for digitization. But this has huge implications for our talent landscape. The workforce must evolve just as quickly in order to succeed, and upskilling is the key to that evolution. The consensus amongst the group was clear that it won’t be an easy path. Rapid change never is, but we all agreed that the time for that change is now, and value to our future will be immense.
The Censia team and I have long known the critical importance of upskilling to the global economy’s health. It is our duty as business leaders to enable the workforce with the skills needed to thrive in the future because relying on new talent to fill those gaps won’t work. Many jobs of the future haven’t even been created yet, so we must look to create a future-proof workforce that is committed to earning and evolving alongside technology while providing people with the technical training and knowledge needed to succeed.
As you can tell, we are quite passionate about upskilling at Censia and recently published a whitepaper on the topic. If you would like to learn more, check out The Future of Talent: Use Upskilling and Reskilling to Optimize Talent, Meet Business Goals, and Reduce Talent Costs.