In an exclusive interaction with SCIKEY, Mr. Anil Santhapuri, Director of Learning and Development at CGI, and a Talent OD professional talks about digital transformation, building a learning culture for remote employees various challenges faced by LD leaders in this new working environment.

With over 2 decades of experience result-oriented Talent OD professionals, can you share your opinion on how technology digitization can fast-track learning and upskilling in 2021?

Digital transformation is affecting all industries and job roles as we speak. Different industries respond to digital transformation in various ways. Certain industries like IT, Finance, and Telecom might transition quickly, whereas others like Manufacturing, Pharma, Transport, or Airlines might take a while to enter this transition based on their speed of adoption.

The way to achieve this is by digitizing our learning experiences. This, since it takes a while for knowledge to transition into skill, and skill to transition into practice. I think what eventually is happening is, we are moving towards learning experiences which is facilitated and accelerated through digitalization. In short, I would say, because of the accelerated digital transformation across industries, it is important to keep our workforce entirely prepared for the same. As LD and HR professionals, we also need to leverage the same digitalization to accelerate our service offerings to our employees.

Considering the newer way of work the workplace, how can LD professionals HR leaders build a learning culture for remote employees?

Technology plays a big role in educating remote employees. Due to COVID, employees had to work in a geographically dispersed and agile work setting. COVID triggered a global experiment as many things changed overnight and we could experiment with remote and virtual work in unprecedented ways. So, from the IT industry perspective, the idea was to keep the employees ready even in these emergent situations as well as for future transitions. In such situations, we don't have the luxury to conduct face-to-face training making us turn towards technology. 

The whole idea is to understand that technology facilitates the process and what’s crucial is to go back to basics and ensure the process is solid. The process is referred to as “Just-in-Time learning”. This is a process in which the employees are prepared well to adapt themselves to situations, starting right from managers to subordinates. It is essential to think of the most appropriate way to apply technology to situations to find the best solution. This is a much better approach than simply onboarding the next big thing in technology and implementing it, when we are unsure of its success rate.  Agile is the only way to implement these learning strategies.

This new world of work has altered our outlook, landing all of us in a “learning” environment that has exciting challenges. So, can you share with us some newer and different ways of maintaining the workplace learning to navigate through the current change?

Changes are constantly taking place. For example, earlier, our clients used to give us a time period of many weeks to respond to an RFP, these days it comes down to just a couple of weeks. So agility is a working strategy for the management that is being considered as the need of the hour. We often use terms like Upskilling and Reskilling. Earlier, a lot of focus was on upskilling depending upon the project and its performance requirements. Now, for keeping our workforce future-ready, a balance of upskilling re-skilling is essential. COVID has acted as a wake-up call for all industries to focus on re-skilling, as digital transformation is impacting all industries.

Few examples of it can be learning agility as a meta-skill, emotional intelligence, or even resilience.

The shelf life of technology its related skills is shifting so quickly that leaders should focus on building meta-skills within employees to adapt themselves to change.  It is important to ensure that our efforts and solutions are invested in the right direction and aligned o the strategy. Generally, the mistake we make is that we implement a new technology in learning and assume that it will solve all of our problems. That’s where I would like to share this distinction. Technology in learning comprises of 3 things- learning methods, learning channels learning platforms. Classroom training vs. coaching is a learning method. A learning channel is a mobile app vs. a website. Using design thinking to make a whole design learner-centric then applying the knowledge wherever appropriate may be a channel/method/platform. Eventually, striking a balance between technology and Strategy and focus for learning is important.  The learning strategy and approach comes first and later technology will play a big role in the implementation.

What is your advice for LD leaders and People Managers who face challenges to skill and re-skill their employees including cost and other bottlenecks?

The first challenge that needs to be overcome is breaking certain myths. In India, the most common terminology used is tactical skills or hard skills, and the rest are treated as soft skills. This wouldn't be the right approach according to the latest report on jobs released by the World economic forum in October 2020. The report talks about the top 15 skills needed for jobs in 2025. Amongst the 15 skills listed within them, only 3 skills are related to technology, whereas the rest are either cognitive or a thinking skill. Therefore, labeling skills just as hard/soft skills could be folly.

The second mistake is seeing such skills as point-in-time skills assuming we will develop them just when we need these. A growth mindset is a meta-skill but more importantly, resilience is a meta-skill which can help you adapt as per changing time and situations. Meta skills are different from standard skills as they come from a big picture perspective. Meta skills include paying dividends of learning exponentially to amplify a whole skill. Showcasing that difference will get the right amount of commitment from people. As depicted by previous researches, people with higher emotional intelligence have high chances of success and growth. 

Transparency, too, plays an essential role to maintain a healthy and productive environment at work. Whereas, if there is chaos within the organisation, you might lose the grip over your employees and customers. It all starts with the management level for if employees witness chaos at the management level, the same would trickle down to the middle and lower levels of an organization. It’s crucial to avoid chaos and embrace efficient operations all the way. It takes a long-term culture-building approach for the learning needs to be normalised irrespective of an individual’s position or authority in an organisation. Transparency is a key tenet for Agile culture too.

The first dilemma they encounter is when to keep the talent ready? It needs to be just-in-time as going too early or too late wouldn't be beneficial. Keeping a future-focused plan ready with plans to keep learning would be an effective approach to take. The next paradox is learning from experiences vs. learning from others. It’s necessary for people from different industries to share their experiences with others. This highlights the ecosystem and promotes it as the best way to get situations and their solutions together for everyone. Facilitating paradoxical leadership is a key role that HR and LD has to play.

About SCIKEY: