UNLEASH America: Future-proof your organization

The ‘Great Resignation’ is giving HR teams a headache. As they grapple with how to retain existing staff, they are also struggling to find the right candidates for these open roles.

A major challenge they are facing is finding qualified candidates with the right skills – there is a particular shortage of job seekers with digital skills.

This digital skills gap is likely to only become more acute in the hybrid future of work. Successful hybrid work will require companies (and their teams) to continue to embrace more advanced tech solutions.

To stay ahead of the skills crisis, organizations need to get proactive and start predicting the skills they will need in the future, and how they will access them from both within their current talent pool and beyond.

One company that is ahead of the curve is pharma giant Novartis.

At UNLEASH America 2022, Novartis’ head of strategic workforce planning René Gessenich shared the inside track on how the company is identifying the skills of the future.

Addressing the skills challenges at Novartis

A core HR priority for Novartis is very much on-trend with this year’s UNLEASH America show. It is ‘unleashing the power of your people’, and it focuses on topics like “being inspired”, as well as building skills.

Gessenich continued: “We’ve all heard a lot about skills, but if you’re not clear on what is actually the problem you’re trying to solve, then you’re probably not going to generate the effect you’re trying to generate.”

So when Novartis decided two years ago to start working on future-proofing the organization around talent and skills, it didn’t do it across the whole workforce.

Instead, the pharma giant became laser-focused on particular skills that managers identified as “where…we need to play” to compete for talent in the future. Novartis also used Burning Glass labor market intelligence to see how its skills and competencies stake up to the rest of the market.

Success for Gessenich comes from relying on integrated solutions – “you cannot have many different taxonomies in different systems that don’t speak to each other”.

Novartis uses Cornerstone, Gloat, EdCast, and Workday, as well as strategic workplace planning processes that go beyond capacity (simply, how many employees do we need?) and towards the specific skills organizations need now and in the future.

However, it is not all about tech. Gessenich is clear that successful upskilling “takes culture, it takes good leadership” to solve HR and business problems of the future.

If you want more from UNLEASH America but can’t make it to Vegas, check out our website and our social media channels