Continuous Upskilling: The path to success
The beginning of New Year brings in the opportunity to retrospect the last year and think about all the things which have gone past. The things which you are grateful for and the things which could you could have been done better.
Being on the technology side and in middle of this technological transformation — where you see things are moving very rapidly, where Automation and Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Software is the buzz word, code is replacing some of the human tasks, auto bots doing human tasks, so on and so forth. It raises a few very interesting questions:
What would be the necessary skills for the future work?
What skills needed to be acquired to face this change?
Are robots really replacing the humans at work?
How do we as human technologist create value in this ever-increasing world of automation?
Are soft skills automatable?
Intelligent software, AI and intelligent automation are facilitating or replacing engineers doing routine and repetitive jobs. We have started seeing the use of intelligent software in common places such as bots taking and serving orders at restaurants, proving banking assistance, interactive chat engines, drones making the last mile deliveries, driverless cars etc. Slowly and gradually AI is invading into many roles — with the AI tools around, the software’s are becoming more probabilistic which impersonates human-like thinking based on data and algorithms
Even with so many technological advancements, there is a strong need for engineers to continue to acquire and upskill the technical and soft skills as they play an important foundation to build upon. Primarily due to some of these common facts:
- There are tools and technologies which can help to derive some of the possible outcomes. However, skilled engineers would always be needed to have vital skills to inference the best way forward. For instance, problem-solving, it is right the AI can solve many complex problems that human cannot but in cases where the problems are not defined in entirety, engineers use their cognitive and reasoning skills to figure out best possible solutions that machines would not be able to discover
- Additionally, the ability to brainstorm, innovate and collaborate to create new ideas is an important and powerful piece that can enhance as well as optimize business performances and processes. And, it has nothing to do with available automation tools and technologies. These are technologist’s skill that embodies the significant value that automation simply cannot replace or offer.
- Furthermore, there are plenty of common software’s which are deterministic, they cannot think themselves and are mostly designed to follow fixed rules such as if this the do that and else do this.
Undoubtedly, there is a definite need for upskilling and the following points may be the way forward to a successful amalgamation of technological influx and change embracement:
- Be comfortable with intelligent technology and keeping the understanding up to date. It is imperative to have a clear and up-to-date understanding of technological development and its possible impact on employees
- Eliminate fear and doubts: The only thing that is constant in the world is change and this rally towards intelligent technology is unstoppable. Thus, just eliminate fear, doubts, and uncertainty and embrace the change. Look for ways to maximize new technology in upskilling that can help facilitate better employee engagement and productivity.
- Analyze business vision and the expected tech stack accordingly create a training program to improve in areas where employees need help. There is always a mix of engineers in the team — plan the training at both teams and individual levels.
- Use AI tools to enhance learning, human resource operations (recruitment, etc.) and learning. The existing Intelligent and smart software can help in improving analyzing the skill gaps, learning content and training material development, recruitment, performance assessment & development.
- Resource pool: Following similar and common standards, language and understanding across multiple teams. This might help in creating a flexible resource pool and making engineers deployable across different areas as needed.
Overall, we can conclude that the tools would gradually become even more powerful — however, it would need a workforce to operate or program using such tools. The engineers or workforce would act as catalysts and technology would act as an integrator to furnish the job but there is a strong need to upskill yourself in alignment with this digital transformation and disruption.
