Comments
Gianni Giacomelli, chief innovation leader at Genpact, a professional services firm, believes there are many “invisible employees” in organisations, who already have the expert skills and knowledge others need. Turning those “invisibles” into knowledge leaders could prove to be a secret reskilling weapon for companies, he adds.
Giacomelli said corporate learning and development programmes must receive the same type of deep design thinking as customer-facing products and services. In this way, he said, businesses have an opportunity to create their very own “network of knowledge” to reskill employees faster and more efficiently.
A recent study by Genpact showed a notable disconnect between executives and workers on reskilling offerings. “It is time to utilise the knowledge that already resides within the organisation. Identify the nodal individuals who either possess or broker the new skills and leverage them,” said Giacomelli.
New knowledge, however, needs to be heavily contextualised. “Adults struggle with understanding and retaining concepts that are not connected with their existing knowledge. That is why we must identify linkages between existing and new skills,” said Giacomelli.
Reskilling programmes
More than half of the senior executives surveyed by Genpact said their companies offer reskilling programmes, but only a quarter of workers reported having participated in them. That gap may exist because workers and business leaders define reskilling differently, said Giacomelli.
“I believe the problem with many reskilling programmes is that they are too focussed on the short-term to properly prepare workers for ongoing tech transformation across industries,” adds Giacomelli, who is also head of design at MIT’s Collective Intelligence Design Lab.
By combining the contemporary understanding of learning science with new operating models derived from the MIT centre, Genpact has designed a scalable infrastructure for customised reskilling paths — Genome — which has unconventional tenets at its inception.
Comments
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.