Digital Gap Minding in IT Talent Management
Develop talent for tomorrow, rather than just hire for yesterday.
Human capital is always the most valuable asset in any business today, especially now the rate of change is accelerated, and knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened. The talent gap is the reality, not a fiction, this is particularly true for IT talent management. Organizations now have to make more tough choices to compete for the future, to balance the short term talent demand and long-term strategic requirement. More specifically, which approach should IT take to fill the gaps and also innovate talent management to capture the emergent digital trends and build a smooth digital pipeline?
Constructive Thinking about IT talent competencies at both strategic level and operational level: IT leaders play a crucial role in identifying talent gaps, and align talent skills and collective human capabilities with strategy execution. One of the skill gaps is the lack of digital mindset and recombinant capabilities in the IT leadership. Often times they look narrowly at specific problems and projects developed to solve those business problems or meet the immediate staff requirement at the operational level, partly because that is the way funding is allocated, rather than having a broad view of their enterprise and the longer term strategy for the organization and build the sustainable human capability for the business growth. With constructive thinking about talent competency at the strategy level. The problem of IT skill gaps should be seen as an opportunity, especially as more and more organizations are seeing IT as an enabler and driver of generating revenues.
There is a shortage of effective talent management which could be translated to a skills shortage: Some talent gaps are artificial because talent management understands issues only basing on the symptoms, and not digging into the root causes. Often managers complain rather than solve the problem, managers complain about the cost but fail to understand the lost opportunity costs. The list goes on. There is Out-of-Date talent recruiting and performance management. There's misunderstanding or miscommunication (lost in translation) in between IT talent request and HR's searching mechanism, also, there's a disconnect of short-term IT staff needs and long term talent perspectives. From overall people management perspective, how to encourage IT professional stepping out of comfort zone, continue to learn, continue to innovate, and update performance management practices by assessing both quantity and quality result objectively, to well define digital talent management in order to adapt to the fast-paced business new normal.
Update Talent Competency Model: Forward-thinking organizations are transforming and moving to reach higher maturity at the digital age. Filling talent gap, updating talent competency model, and taking holistic people management approach are strategic imperative. There needs to be a better appreciation for problem-solving abilities. You can give most people skills easily when compared to trying to give/develop the ability, attitude, flexibility, intelligence, practicality, pragmatism etc. From technological lens, IT talent needs to have both technical and business skills, it should take a preponderant importance in the coming years to make sustainable IT-Business relationship. The value of IT is not in the technology itself but in how to use it, having clearly understood how your business works and what their goals and strategy. There is intense learning and continuous knowledge update for IT professionals due to the changing nature of technology, thus, learning agility is even more important than knowledge itself because a dynamic IT professional can be self-motivated to collect the necessary information and resources for solving problems creatively. There are needs to change so that the independent and critical thinking are encouraged and problem-solving minds are engaged.
Ideologically, the highly effective and highly dynamic digital organizations, no matter large or small, have a multitude of positive characteristics: the startup's business culture-- innovative and dynamic; well-established organization’s structure and expertise, the institute's learning attitude & agility, as the speed of knowledge life cycle is accelerated. They fill talent gaps via reimagining business possibilities, reinventing processes, and fine-tune the digital talent pipelines to discover and develop talent for tomorrow, rather than just hire for yesterday.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Human capital is always the most valuable asset in any business today, especially now the rate of change is accelerated, and knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened. The talent gap is the reality, not a fiction, this is particularly true for IT talent management. Organizations now have to make more tough choices to compete for the future, to balance the short term talent demand and long-term strategic requirement. More specifically, which approach should IT take to fill the gaps and also innovate talent management to capture the emergent digital trends and build a smooth digital pipeline?
Constructive Thinking about IT talent competencies at both strategic level and operational level: IT leaders play a crucial role in identifying talent gaps, and align talent skills and collective human capabilities with strategy execution. One of the skill gaps is the lack of digital mindset and recombinant capabilities in the IT leadership. Often times they look narrowly at specific problems and projects developed to solve those business problems or meet the immediate staff requirement at the operational level, partly because that is the way funding is allocated, rather than having a broad view of their enterprise and the longer term strategy for the organization and build the sustainable human capability for the business growth. With constructive thinking about talent competency at the strategy level. The problem of IT skill gaps should be seen as an opportunity, especially as more and more organizations are seeing IT as an enabler and driver of generating revenues.
There is a shortage of effective talent management which could be translated to a skills shortage: Some talent gaps are artificial because talent management understands issues only basing on the symptoms, and not digging into the root causes. Often managers complain rather than solve the problem, managers complain about the cost but fail to understand the lost opportunity costs. The list goes on. There is Out-of-Date talent recruiting and performance management. There's misunderstanding or miscommunication (lost in translation) in between IT talent request and HR's searching mechanism, also, there's a disconnect of short-term IT staff needs and long term talent perspectives. From overall people management perspective, how to encourage IT professional stepping out of comfort zone, continue to learn, continue to innovate, and update performance management practices by assessing both quantity and quality result objectively, to well define digital talent management in order to adapt to the fast-paced business new normal.
Update Talent Competency Model: Forward-thinking organizations are transforming and moving to reach higher maturity at the digital age. Filling talent gap, updating talent competency model, and taking holistic people management approach are strategic imperative. There needs to be a better appreciation for problem-solving abilities. You can give most people skills easily when compared to trying to give/develop the ability, attitude, flexibility, intelligence, practicality, pragmatism etc. From technological lens, IT talent needs to have both technical and business skills, it should take a preponderant importance in the coming years to make sustainable IT-Business relationship. The value of IT is not in the technology itself but in how to use it, having clearly understood how your business works and what their goals and strategy. There is intense learning and continuous knowledge update for IT professionals due to the changing nature of technology, thus, learning agility is even more important than knowledge itself because a dynamic IT professional can be self-motivated to collect the necessary information and resources for solving problems creatively. There are needs to change so that the independent and critical thinking are encouraged and problem-solving minds are engaged.
Ideologically, the highly effective and highly dynamic digital organizations, no matter large or small, have a multitude of positive characteristics: the startup's business culture-- innovative and dynamic; well-established organization’s structure and expertise, the institute's learning attitude & agility, as the speed of knowledge life cycle is accelerated. They fill talent gaps via reimagining business possibilities, reinventing processes, and fine-tune the digital talent pipelines to discover and develop talent for tomorrow, rather than just hire for yesterday.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
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