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Overcoming the skills gap for an innovative and sustainable future
By Srimathi Shivashankar, Corporate Vice-President and Head of Edtech Business, HCLTech
According to WEF more than 1 billion jobs will be impacted by technology in the coming years. With a rapid digitalization of workplaces, there is ever growing demand for tech skilling of talent.
This demand is quite evident in the UK, as the country witnessed a demand of over 2mn job vacancies but nearly 12mn workers lacked the skills needed, according to Tech Nation, an industry coalition. In addition, the Financial Times reported that 46 per cent of small businesses in the UK tech sector ranked difficulties hiring and a lack of staff with the right skills as their top two concerns for 2023. The report was based on a poll by the Department for Education.
More than one third of the US workforce have limited digital skills, according to the OECD, and in Europe, of 4,000 companies surveyed by Atomico, a third said their biggest challenge was hiring talent with the right skills for the jobs.
Right Shift - From Learning to Assimilating Competencies
We are at a point where the focus is on talent to become job ready for enterprises to stay productive. Companies want their talent to assimilate required competencies for the roles which are industry specific, and not just acquire technical skills. There is a significant leakage in costs and efforts, if the focus is just on technical certifications and not on job ready skilling.
I believe that there are multiple cohorts within organizations today – (1) those who have core tech skills but need adjacencies for moving up their career ladder, and can be upskilled on the job (2) new hires who can be skilled for their first jobs with the right combination of tech, process and industry domain, but with certain amount of fungibility so that they can learn new technologies quickly (3) some who are eager to Switch from current roles to tech infused domain jobs, what I would call as “fit to new purpose” (4) and an emerging significant numbers of people who wish to restart or late start their careers in tech and IT, largely women across the globe (5) often forgotten but need attention is Equity – inclusive learning for those who need special accessibility and assistive tools for learning.
The cohorts are diverse, and the skilling cannot be one-size fits all approach. Democratized learning may support the foundation, but curated learning programs with coaches to support will yield effective return on investments for HR. Bite-sized learning, flexibility and an opt-in environment will all help to overcome employee resistance to start with, but the real acknowledgement comes only if the tech learning is domain infused and is role specific.
Talent transformation with a purpose
My company is committed to this task of helping enterprises to refresh, repurpose and rebalance workforce pool through skilling. Last year the EdTech business vertical was launched, and our Career Shaper platform for Assessments and Learning helps companies to manage their entire talent acquisition and transformation goals with agility.
We build tech academies for enterprises powered by HCLTech Career Shaper platform, and provide products for entire learner and learning lifecycles - (1) competency baseline and skills gaps analysis, (2) job ready skilling across cloud, digital, cybersecurity, data science and core engineering (embedded, VLSI, networking) tracks, (3) immersive labs for safe fail and learn process (4) Customized projects based on experience and industry domain with coaches enhance the competencies of learners and their readiness to meet with the roles that have /will be impacted by technology.
Our learning programs are also cohorts specific – (1) Futurum for STEM grads (2) SwITch for those from non-STEM to move to Tech careers (3) Equity for inclusivity (4) I-Believe for re-start / late-starters in IT (5) TechBee for high school grads for entry level careers to earn while they learn (6) Be Curious for school students
We launched the HCLTech Sustainability School to enable both internal and external stakeholders including customers to embrace ESG concepts.
Quality and quantity: why diversity is the key to smart recruitment in tech
By Arthur Hu, Chief Information Officer, Lenovo
Based on the popular narrative of the employment landscape in 2023, it would be all too easy to fall into the conventional wisdom view. The picture painted right now could be summed up as: too many vacancies and nowhere near enough quality candidates in the pipeline.
As a truly global company, Lenovo takes a different view. One that is shaped by a culture of hard work and ambition, coupled with a firm conviction that the best people will always want to work for the best organizations. Innovative companies attract innovative talent.
Our Environmental, Social and Governance Report contained a clear message that maintaining a diverse culture and striving to achieve our full potential is fundamental to future success. That is why our diversity and inclusion initiatives form the backbone of Lenovo’s hiring strategy.
IT deploys specific technology to ensure we hire diverse talent, beginning with sourcing. To identify and attract candidates with diverse backgrounds we reach out to non-traditional colleges and universities, rather than competing head-on with other firms. And, we start earlier – for example with our wide-ranging internship initiative, which Lenovo has run since 2012 – to identify and cultivate potential talent in their college careers. This is a win-win situation in which they get to know Lenovo and build work experience, while we get a chance to see interns in action. By casting a wider net and starting earlier, we are able to shift attraction of talent to our own terms.
Another insight is that many of the skills necessary to be effective in IT are very much learnable and can be acquired by curious, open-minded talent with an eye towards learning.
Many of the talented individuals at these schools are not making their way through the traditional hiring process, because managers may compare them to stereotypical profiles. What’s more important, than the school someone went to, is that they have the skills and competencies required to do the job.
Learning also happens all throughout life, not just during formal education, so it’s also valuable that the candidate has the right attitude and desire to keep innovating and adapting.
As a global technology company with more than 82,000 employees, retaining and developing the careers of our people is a core priority. We have several learning and development programs in place to make it easy for employees to strengthen existing skills or even learn new ones.
Part of our mission is also to ensure the entire organisation reflects the various cultures and ethnicities of our internal talent.
This extends to establishing a Product Diversity Office to ensure our products are accessible to customers with disabilities. Our Product Diversity Office (PDO), formed in 2019, ensures that our products are not only innovative, but also meet the needs of people from all backgrounds and abilities.
We are focused on taking the office’s function and processes to scale so that, by 2025, 75% of Lenovo’s products are vetted for inclusion by design experts.
Initiatives such as this are a reflection of the company’s mission to produce Smarter Technology for All. Our commitment to leveraging technology to solve humanity’s greatest challenges is very bold, but the top talent to whom this kind of ambition appeals is a key reason why top talent comes to work for us.