Training Industry Magazine - May/June 2017 - 41

EMERGING PRACTICES
The people-side of digital transformation
is a work in progress. Some industries,
those underpinned by technology for
value delivery, are relative natives to
the concept of digital competence.
Incumbent industries face a radical
transformation, either by external
forces or by internal leadership.
Forward leaning organizations have
instituted broad-based efforts to select
and develop competence toward
new work and jobs emerging in the
digital economy.
About four years ago, Dr. Greg Powers,
vice president of technology for
Halliburton, a leading oil field services
company, decided to build an innovation
pioneering team that could tackle the
toughest product development and
solution challenges to make machines
smarter. To drive more value to their
customers, Powers knew they needed
the ability to build and run complex
experiments, and to model systems
from first principles or heuristics. Powers
was able to find the right talent, but it
was not easy. "We don't see enough
sophisticated control engineers coming
out of US schools," he noted. "Nirvana
would be systems engineers who
understand automation and can build
and run complex simulated models.
We hired from a small group of US
universities with excellent programs,
with the vast majority of our hires having
obtained their undergraduate education
in Asia. The US supply is below demand
and the universities need to emphasize
these skills and opportunities more
to undergraduates," Powers reports.
In the financial services sector, American
Express has redirected its recruitment
efforts to hire the skills needed to
power its digital transformation. Brian
Ruggiero, vice president of Global
Campus Recruitment, said that despite
widespread job cuts, the company
has hired more employees for skills to
transform the business towards mobile
payment and digital service offerings.
"We are looking for talented individuals
who are fluent in code, understand
parallel processing, data clustering and
statistical analysis. These skill sets are
very different from the ones you would
expect from American Express, but
being successful in the digital payments

industry means we are hiring and
training differently in order to innovate
and grow."
Tetra Pak, a multinational food
packaging and processing company
that originated in Sweden, established a
Digital Board and appointed a VP Digital
Officer, who has the responsibility
to manage and coordinate different
initiatives. Ralph Hagg, vice president
of the Tetra Pak Academy, is responsible
for examining how the company
develops digital capability-specifically
digital competence and skills, behavior,
mindset and culture. Hagg notes "from
a talent management point of view,

The biggest challenge
for digital transformation
isn't the technology
- it's the people.
digital capability includes where, how
and who we recruit and how we further
develop them and all other staff." As part
of Digital Capability, the Tetra Pak talent
and learning functions are working to
engage employees more through digital
media and e-learning.
Forward-leaning incumbent organizations
are working to break down longstanding hierarchies and decision
mechanisms to foster agility and drive
innovation. Through the ongoing
research, several key themes emerge as
critical components of a strong digital
talent strategy:
* Senior leaders act as
architects and advocates
* Digital competence is being
built into the entire talent lifecycle
* Agile innovation is
promoted and protected
* Learning is becoming personalized
* Educational institutions
are engaged as critical partners
* Talent functions take the leadership
role for digital talent transformation

Now is the time for chief talent, HR
and learning officers-in partnership
with other executives and education
partners-to
articulate
a
digital
competence framework to accelerate
skills needed for the new era.

DEFINING DIGITAL COMPETENCE
It's a VUCA world: volatility, uncertainty,
complexity and ambiguity. Proliferation
of information and communication
technologies,
globalization
and
accelerated change have contributed
to the VUCA state of our world. The
"VUCA world" is the context in which
the digital transformation of business
occurs. Having VUCA-capable leaders is
correlated to financial performance, yet
in a Conference Board Global Leadership
Forecast, less than two-thirds of leaders
said they were confident in their ability
to meet VUCA challenges. The skills
required for the assembly line of the
Industrial Revolution are giving way
to innovation, collaboration, problemsolving and communication.
In Dancing with Robots, Frank Levy and
Richard Murnane examine the structural
economic changes brought about by
technology. They argue that the future
of work will focus on three human
activities:
* Solving unstructured problems
* Working with new information
* Carrying out non-routine manual tasks
The bulk of the rest of the work will
be done by computers or offshore labor.
Digital-era business requires flexibility,
innovation, collaboration and personal
responsibility. Employees are expected
to adapt to and thrive in a VUCA world.
In this context, digital competence is
more than simply computer, software
or data related skills. As the 4 A's of
technology take center stage, industry
requires a holistic framework for
digital competence that reflects the
systematic, strategic, innovative and
collaborative skills required to transform
business models.
An adaptive understanding of competence,
such as the definition put forth by
the Organization for Economic CoOperation and Development, is critical:
A competency is more than just
knowledge and skills. It involves the

T R A I N I N G I N DUSTR Y MA GAZ INE - MIND THE GAP 201 7 I WWW . T RAININGINDU S T RY . C OM/ MAGAZ I NE

| 41

http://content.thirdway.org/publications/714/Dancing-With-Robots.pdf http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/definitionandselectionofcompetenciesdeseco.htm http://www.trainingindustry.com/ezine.aspx

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Training Industry Magazine - May/June 2017