The iNurture CHRO Series: Skilling India for Digital Transformation

The CHRO dinner meet was intellectualized to associate with HR leaders of companies with over 500 employee strength across industry verticals from all over the country.

The goal was to get near to this community who are principally people decision makers in firms for iNurture to offer certification programmes, workshops and customized skilling programmes, placements and internships, industry visits and guest lectures.

The idea was to draw the right audience for the meet was “Skilling for Digital Transformation”. One of the major concerns, as firms go digital, is to appeal and preserve skilled talent to internalize this change and run with it. Skill is becoming the top-most issues facing the digital business. And, the current approaches to developing digital skill are broken – according to a report on “Digital Talent Gap”.

The introduction of digital transformation including SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud), advanced robotics, 3-D printing, wearable technologies, Internet of Things/Everything, drones and autonomous devices, etc. are altering the way businesses run. It is a novel world of business that we see, and it is about to explode. Every segment of the business has move to digital currently. Ideation, Designing, 3-D Visualisation and realisation have turned into digital. The influence of it is that without cutting-edge skills, designers and engineers coming out of institutes cannot even get an entry-level job. Nowadays, digital literacy is as imperative to the future as maths and English.

Today businesses have two kinds of individuals – the digital natives and the digital migrants. Digital natives are the novel generation of workforce, born into the smartphones, whatsapp, digital music, online everything who trust in information on their fingertips at the time of their choice on a gadget of their choice. Then there are Digital Migrants – individuals like you and me – we adopted the smartphones, still contend if whatsapp is good or bad for us, are acclimatising to online buying, particularly groceries.

The 2nd part of the CHRO series in partnership with Raise Global, a community development and events company, was conducted at Vivanta by Taj, Chennai from 6:30 pm onwards over dinner. The objective of this debate was to bring together thought leaders from key establishments to deliver insights and ideas on how preeminent to build digital competencies in an enterprise, supported by examples and case studies.

The Event
Over 14 CHROs from large Indian firms, based in Chennai, attended the conference. A partial list of participants are listed here:
• Cmdr. KNV Nair, Director HR, Sodexo
• Ganapathy Subramanian, Head HR, Sundaram Finance
• Hariharan Vishwanathan, Head HR, Mobius
• Kishor Majumdar, GM HR, TTK Healthcare
• Nakeeran, Head L&D, TI India
• VP Ponnuswamy, Head HR – South, Reckit Benkieser
• Sunita Lal, CHRO, Matrimony[dot]com

The event ended with a presentation by Venkatanarayanan R, President HR, IT and Education at Rane Group and Pramod Idiculla from iNurture.

“Digital has arrived, changing the very fabric of business operations”, Pramod went on to elucidate the impact of the digital transformation, and highlighted the negative impact by saying, “While technology challenges and risks related to security and privacy, obsolescence, etc. exists, one of the key challenges that firms face is the unprecedented shortage of digital skills in firm around the world today.”

Sharing insights on country-level challenges, Pramod explained that only 2.3% of the Indian
workforce has undertaken formal skill teaching, in comparison to 68% in UK and 52% in the US and
that the harsh Indian reality is that youth living in over 6, 40,000 villages of India today is grappling
with paucity of skills and low self-esteem.

The Digirati Challenge
Pramod addressed those firms leading the digital transformation journey as Digirati’s and highlighted the key challenges facing those who are still contending with the journey. Some of the highlights of the section are:

• Digital leaders or ‘Digirati’ are already capitalizing in digital skills and reaping momentous benefits in contrast to other companies.

On an average, ‘Digirati’ are 26% more profitable than their industry competitors ,4 key challenges facing firms today Companies are not investing in digital skills , Training programmes run by companies to reskill the digital migrants are out of sync.

• Many Companies Continue to Use Traditional Approaches for Sourcing Digital Skills

• Role of the HR function in Digital Skills Development

Pramod pitched in the iNurture angle by comparing the leaders of the industry, and how they have
been able to climb the ladders of success in their digital transformation journey. He explained that
iNurture can partner with the participating firm in creating and incubating digital skills
within their firms.

Conclusion
Pramod concluded his presentation by throwing 3 key questions that every CHRO should be
asking within his organization and then introduced iNurture with a couple of slides on our corporate
presentation.