Investing in people can transform people from being a victim of digitalization to playing an active role in driving positive change to the workforce.

The post-pandemic world has urged many industries to focus on the upskilling programs for their people, to cope with the needs of digitalization. In fact, the skills gap has not been a new debate in the past decade. The hit of COVID-19 has accelerated the transformation, making many businesses face the pressure of needing to close the skills gap more urgently.

However, digital skills are definitely not the only most valuable skill sets to overcome an organization’s challenges right now. Digitalization has instead accelerated the need to cultivate deeply human skills. The values of what ‘humans’ could bring to workforce culture would serve as a strong foundation for an organization to thrive in the future of work.

As technology evolves and becomes a more viable replacement for manual and repetitive work, employees need to be upskilled to complement this evolution. Such human skills include leadership, relationship management, agility, emotional intelligence, creativity and innovation, as well as critical thinking and analytical skills. For example, in this era where data is so accessible and overloaded, how do we make sense of data and apply them to generate effective outcomes that actually make difference to businesses. This requires a team that is working towards reaching an end objective that adds values to the bigger picture than to continue to strive in everyday business processes that remain ineffective.

This is the key focus of why we do what we do. In our recent project with Darck, we had worked with the CEO to identify the key breakthrough skills needed for the team to bring the organization forward. To be exact, we were focusing on transforming the people, not just the business model.

We were able to quickly understand of what was sort of like a SWOT analysis for the team as we obtained precise input through the assessment tool. What happened after was I managed to have a one to one session with each person from my team, and we figured out what we could do for each part. Throughout the ironing process, we obtained significantly different perspectives from what people had spoken and while filling up the assessment. There was a difference from both inputs. So throughout the conversations, we could draw inference from the report more objectively.  – Sanjay Chan, CEO of DARCK

With the launch of Development Optimiser, we wish to identify key knots in teams’ existing skills and competencies. However, what we do realize as something more important is the awareness and the willingness of the leaders within an organization to start addressing and taking actions for their people’s needs. The ironing process that is carried out is what sets the difference.

Keeping the upskilling momentum, we wish to continue to work with more like-minded organizations to redefine upskilling initiatives. They don’t necessarily need to be KPI-driven solely, but to start with understanding what works and what doesn’t work in everyone’s working dynamic and culture on a day-to-day basis. Beyond that, we need to ask ourselves how are we working along with our people to grow, and most importantly, to create a workforce that leverages technology to progress, than to be eliminated by them. Investing in people can transform people from being a victim of digitalization to playing an active role in driving positive change to the workforce.

Development Optimiser is designed and developed by CORE-MUNITY with Ezyspark,  South East Asia’s first matchmaking platform for corporate training to help organizations to prioritize and maximize their investment in learning and development.