The Covid-19 epidemic has hastened enterprise digital transformation, opening up significant prospects for all businesses. Given the customer-centric nature of India’s IT business, the demand climate is highly favourable, and several companies have stated that they expect double-digit growth this fiscal year.
To address the talent shortage, businesses are taking a multi-pronged approach: increase new hires to expand the supply pool, improve re-skilling programmes through online learning, deploy adjacent-talent skills for on-the-job learning, and, most importantly, provide employees with a holistic employment experience that includes career development, learning, and wellness.
In an emerging technological environment, India has a significant possibility of becoming the world’s digital talent hub. By 2025, demand for sophisticated technological expertise such as AI, robots, and data science will be 20 times larger than supply.
Digital Talent :-
- These are (talented) workers who can adapt to and utilize current digital technology.
- Investing in upskilling may possibly enhance the world economy by USD 6.5 trillion by 2030 and India’s GDP by USD 570 billion, according to a World Economic Forum analysis.
- Digital talent is not the same as traditional STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education.
- Instead, digital talent comes from a digital-first attitude that includes both hard digital talents like data analytics and soft digital skills like storytelling, ambiguity tolerance, and so on.
- The days of an engineer sitting in a room writing code are long gone. Today, narrative is the most critical ability for a data scientist.
Indian Prospects :-
- India must disrupt the traditional approach to talent development if it is to maintain its leadership in the digital era.
- Around the world, the race to become and be perceived as a talent hotspot is heating up.
- For example, in order to become the preferred investment hub for technology businesses, the UAE has announced intentions to roll out green visas, broaden eligibility for golden visas, and recruit top tech talent.
- Other nations, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, are reconsidering attempts to recruit high-skill individuals, such as fast-tracking visas for at-risk industries and boosting visas for highly accomplished candidates.
- The greatest potential for India is to build digital talent for the future world. India is going to be the world’s talent leader.
- India’s greatest competitive edge will be its human capital. Business will go where the talent is, and investment choices will be made based on that.
Reasons For Lack of Digital Talent :-
- Digital Skills Deficit: In 2019, 53 percent of Indian enterprises were unable to hire due to a skills shortage.
- As a result, one of today’s major concerns is a scarcity of digital skills.
- Problem of Brain Drain: One of the major issues is that our best-trained minds do not stay in the United States; instead, they go elsewhere.
- It’s known as the “brain drain,” or the enormous exodus of skilled workers from India.
- Standard of Private Institution: There are many private engineering colleges that do not teach anything and are managed only for personal wealth rather than for the benefit of students or society.
- Lack of Compensation: People working in technical professions are simply underpaid.
- India is the only country where an engineering student can get an MBA to pursue a career in marketing or management directly after graduation.
- High Unemployment: Inequality, as well as rural and urban misery, is on the rise in the country. Migration is also on the rise, real estate values have plummeted, spending is on the rise, and salaries have been flat for some time.
- Lack of focus on research and development: India’s digital talent tends to be more concerned with wage packages than with innovation.
Way Forward :-
- Focused Implementation of the National Education Policy: It is critical to maintain a long-term perspective and instill the appropriate attitudes.
- Continuous learning, skill credits, world-class academic innovation, experiential learning, and faculty development must all be centered on quality and outcomes.
- Build Alternative Talent Pools: We need to improve digital skills in smaller towns, attract more women to work in hybrid work environments, and restructure vocational education at industrial training institutions and polytechnics.
- For these programmes, we can use corporate-social-responsibility (CSR) financing from industry.
- Incentivize Skilling: In the early days of the tech industry, tax incentives were critical in helping multinational firms establish a worldwide presence in India.
- We must now devise strategies to reward corporate skilling, not only for their personal benefit, but for the sake of the entire ecosystem.
- Investigate Novel Learning Models: Apprenticeship programmes should be used on a large scale, not just for a certificate, but also for evaluations.
- Invest in creating world-class free information that can be used by anybody and is backed up by a legitimate certification system.
- Democratize Training: All barriers to individuals becoming skilled must be removed. Unnecessary entrance qualifications and qualifying criteria might be omitted. We’ll have no access barriers, but we’ll have a quality-controlled departure procedure.
Conclusion :-
To catalyze the next decade of growth and innovation, India must not just consider initiatives focused at growing home-grown talent, but also concentrate on recruiting the greatest global talent. This necessitates ongoing expenditures in re-skilling and the adoption of a skill-development-friendly culture. Developing a strong digital talent ecosystem would help us to be more future-ready and take advantage of digital possibilities.
