Building A Future-Ready Workforce

In 2016 People Matters and BITS Pilani presented a study on L&D priorities of organizations for the coming year. This year the research tries to assess how accurate the function has remained to last year’s vision for itself and dug deeper into the changing landscape of skills that organizations have to navigate in the next 18 months.

Today as we look around us and try to distill the news emerging trends from the corporate world all over the globe, the common theme that emerges is related to the technological disruption that is either visible or on the horizon. The desire to harness advances in computing technology, telecommunications, and data analytics to propel the business to the next level is all pervasive.

Going beyond the IT sector where the core product itself is technology, even sectors where the product is not technologically or digitally dependent, grocery retail, for instance, the use of digital technology as an integral part of the business models has shown an exponential growth. Disruption is also inevitable in sectors like Automobiles. The Indian Government has recently announced its intention to push for electric vehicles in a big way, a move that is likely to create demand for a new set of technical skills due to the change in vehicle technology.

Transforming business models requires fundamental changes in the work culture of organizations, which is primarily the responsibility of the Learning & Development function. Therefore, forward-thinking L&D teams are those that are striving to stay on top of the domain trends in today’s fast-changing environment. The key findings from last year’s Study indicated that building skills and capabilities required across the organization for the future, aligning L&D strategy to the business and developing a cadre of future leaders were also the top three priorities for the next three years.

As a continuation of last year’s study on L&D trends, People Matters and BITS-Pilani present this annual L&D Trends survey with an endeavor to analyze the year-on-year changes in the L&D function’s priorities, drivers and strategic role and also to identify the top new-age skills required by the workforce in today’s digital disruptive world.