Talent Reclamation – A new way to tap human potential!

Reclamation is an age old concept that has been applied to reclaiming natural resources and assets and put to productive use.Every aspect of our lives depends in some way upon water.  From all facets of food production, to domestic and industrial usage, to environmental needs, water is a critical common denominator.  In the arid western United States, this precious resource is especially valuable because it is so scarce.

How the Reclamation Program developed the West

Today, the many benefits of controlling water in this way are evident in the extensive development that has taken place throughout the West over the past 100 years.  Huge cities have been created and millions of people live, work, and recreate in this desert region.  But, as the West continues to grow, we must face the problem of continually increasing demands on a finite supply of water.  This includes human population needs and the needs of the environment.Extensive tracts of arid and semi-arid lands have become some of the most productive agricultural area and urban centres in the world. The concept of acreage limitations with regard to Reclamation irrigation water started when the Reclamation Act of 1902 was enacted in the United States of America. The primary goal of the Reclamation program at that time was to develop the arid West by promoting farming opportunities for families and limiting speculation on land that would benefit from the introduction of irrigated agriculture.

Talent Needs in the transforming world

To draw a corollary Talent is an equally scarce resource and it is imperative to seed, develop and suitably harvest this resource to feed the corporate need for quality talent. An example on point goes back more than 100 years. In the middle of the nineteenth century, one of the greatest U.S presidents, Abraham Lincoln, acted on a vision to connect his vast country from east to west via railroad. The project required thousands of men with the skills, muscle, and work ethic to physically move mountains. However in that year – 1865, the Central Pacific Railroad had five times as much work as it had labourers to perform it. In addition turnover was high due to long hours, hard work. At the same time there were many immigrants specially of Chinese origin had spring up in the West Coast and waves of Irish immigrants had been arriving at the East coast for decades and thousands of Civil war soldiers and freed slaves were scrambling for a common need – wages.The recruitment of this vast talent – Irish labourers, civil war veterans and freed slaves and the influx of Chinese immigrants that provided the talent pipeline to make one of the most challenging projects in America’s history a success.The dynamics have not changed over these years. It is just that the context has switched from the Central Pacific Railroad to the digital railroads opening up global requirements for emerging talent.The forces of disruptions in the talent play are essentially caused by a threefold shift in the demographic profile of the working population, increased immigration controls and bursts in offshoring activities.

Shift #1: Sweeping demographic changes at both ends of the generational spectrum are affecting the talent markets in many ways. One of the most profound trends facing the talent arena is worldwide aging of the population in developed nations. In Japan, the labor force is expected to fall by 1.6 million persons by 2007.Germany is expected to lose nearly half a million workers in the same time frame. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projections show that the number of people 55 or older in the US work force will increase by more 49% by 2010.

Shift #2: September 11, 2001 changed the way most nations are dealing with immigration. Heightened security and stricter immigration laws is making talent movements a lot more difficult and cumbersome. Foreign students who historically considered United States of America for education are now looking for new sources like Australia, United Kingdom or even virtual universities in India and Asia. Students tend to often remain in the country in which they were educated is redefining the way new talent is getting deployed and The wave that worked over a hundred years ago while the Central Pacific Railroad was being built is not necessarily working now in current times.

Shift: #3: Off shoring has been moving jobs from industrialized nations to countries where wages are less expensive. Jobs that can be performed just about anywhere by people with the right skills and training will continue to be relocated. A recent McKinsey study suggests that 11% of worldwide service employment could in theory be performed remotely. And actual offshore employment will reach 4.1 million jobs in 2008.The shift from the local to a globally distributed work model  has also opened newer challenges in terms of alignment of remote locations to the hub ,cultural patterns that are different and unique in different locations.Demographic shifts, tighter immigration controls and offshoring are more of the demand side economic forces. On the supply chain, offshore companies experience abundance of labor pool but face limitations in terms of suitability. As per a McKinsey study, “Thirteen percent of the potential talent supply is suitable to work for multinational companies.”.The reasons for low levels of suitability are – lack of necessary language skills, low quality of significant portions of the educational system and limited ability to impart practical skills and lack of cultural fit. A case in point for the India and China. Even though China’s population is 16 times the size of Philippines, for instance, its pool of young professional engineers is only 3 times the size of Philippines. The situation is not too different for India. A study conducted by Global Insight, Country Ministries of Education/Labor Statistics Offices; HR Interviews indicate that only India has only 130,000 suitable young professional engineers less than 7 years work experience in a population of over a billion people.“It really seems odd. In the world’s most populous regions the biggest problem facing employers is a shortage of people”.This scenario is no different from the year 1849 when the Central Pacific Railroad network was being put together. The only difference is the reach of this railroad has extended beyond the geographical boundaries of the Americas to a global level. We are also now talking about digital railroads that connecting two points of a globally distributed work environment that are thousands of miles away.

Talent Reclamation – The new vision to tap the unlimited human potential

 Let us take India’s example which has two key resources – Agriculture and Manpower.“Green Revolution” that was an experiment undertaken during the period from 1967 to 1978 in India .It meant self sufficiency in food production by drastically increasing yield. The three basic elements were continued expansion of farming areas, double cropping of existing farmland and using seeds with superior genetics.Technology has played a key role in developing this natural resource. Institutions like the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, WAPCOS (Water and Power Consultancy Organization) emerged with special chapters like the Indian Society of Soil Science. Research based work along with private sector investment in technologies wrote the history of a very successful Green Revolution in India. Tractor as an example was the perfect technology enabled investment that happened that contributed in increasing the yield.Talent or Manpower as a resource in India available in abundance. With Human Resources we are at the same stage today as we were with Agriculture farm production post independence era. The corporate world is facing an acute shortage of skilled labour.  As per a McKinsey study multinationals that look for talent in the emerging world would consider employing only 10 to 25 percent of graduates in India. Specifically for engineering graduates it would go up to 25%.The proportion of suitable engineers in Central Europe is twice as high. In India only 1.2 million people hold engineering degrees which is 4% of the total university educated workforce, as compared with 20% in Germany and 33% in China.

From Green to Grey, but it is still a revolution in the making 

A Grey Revolution is gathering momentum in India, with the largest highways construction programme in the world, the mushrooming of suburbs, a boom in the retailing and construction industry, and a surge in the demand for homes. As per IBEF – Indian Brand Equity Foundation, capital formation in public sector projects has grown sharply by 7.2 per cent between the years 2002 and 2003 – an encouraging trend since such projects are the lifeline for job creation in a country like India, because they absorb rural labour and unskilled workers. According to an estimate by the Indian Building Association, during the last 5 years, about US$ 15 billion were spent by the Central Government, just on construction of Power Plants. There has been a mass movement of manpower from the rural areas to urban locations.The World Bank had in 1995 estimated that the number of people migrating from the rural to the urban centres in India by the year 2010, which is not far away now, would be equal to twice the combined population of UK, France and Germany. We have seen similar trends in China where young adults from rural areas are leaving their small country farms for jobs in China’s urban centres. As reported by Leslie T Chang for the Wall Street Journal, estimates show that as many as 114 million people have participated in this migration. The largest “migrant” talent force in history.Talent Reclamation is a possible answer to bring in some order in the socio economic and political chaos that such mass movements will bring in. This will happen with the right collaborative efforts of the enterprise and the academia that would trigger the change to build an education based talent economy.Education based talent economy is going to be fork lifted by the three pronged effort of the academia, media and telecommunications network that has been growing by leaps and bounds in the last decade or so in India. The overall enabler is going to be technology.

Let us take the media side first. In much of the industrialized world, television is a big part of the public consciousness. Even in India television networks are penetrating into the remote interiors of the country .This by far is a great digital railroad that could connect corporations with the vast pool of human talent. There are examples of groups in Southern California that have created career entertainment channel to deliver cable TV programming about work. Even organizations can create an ecosystem of television programming about jobs,careers.A very close corollary to this was special program on Agriculture training and development more popularly known as “Krishi Darshan” aired by Doordrashan,the state owned enterprise for media communications in India. The need is to take the same model and run it on the talent resource of the country.

Telecommunication Infrastructure has been building up and providing the much needed bandwidth which is essential for connecting the widely dispersed dots on the talent map of India. Today this service comes at a very affordable entry level price of Rs.100 a month which is by all comparisons the cheapest telecom service in the world. As this network grows, every single connection is transferring information power to a large talent pool of people in India. The capability of cell phones to transmit both voice and data has given rise to “VCasts” which are short broadcast television episodes created for viewing on cell phone screens. VCasts can videos about a special job, CEO presentations; training material etc.Technology is enabling the streaming of VCasts on cell phones in combination with TV programming.This convergence of media channels, the internet and the wireless telecom networks will provide the technology framework for talent reclamation in emerging economies like India. Academia especially the virtual universities are best poised to lead that change. Open Universities like the Indira Gandhi National Open University in India is in the list of the largest universities in the world according to Wikipedia.com.

This is imperative as the business models of the future are getting built more around convergence. And if Time Warner could have done this many years ago , emerging economies like India provides a perfect ground for global knowledge and local intelligence to come together and create new business models to build a talent based economy in the 21^st century.

- Dheeraj Prasad 

Talent Mapping in India – How deep is the Talent Pool and best practices to deep dive?

A McKinsey study reports that India’s pool of young graduates (those with seven years or less of work experience) is estimated at 14 million.This number is topped up by 2.5 million that gets added every year.This is the largest talent pool in this age group amongst 28 countries studied by McKinsey Global Institute.

The study also brought out the downside of low employability of this huge talent pool.As per the report about 25% of the total engineering talent pool is employable in India.But inspite of this short supply of available talent pool, India continues to be a destination for knowledge work for global companies.But there are pressures being felt on the same talent pool as demand overshoots supply.

It is not only an “Unemployment” story in emerging markets like India but one of “Employability”.

I see the untapped potential of India’s talent pool getting mapped and developed through a combined effect of 2 key forces - “Network” and “Social Entrepreneurship”.

There are two mission driven companies that are working towards bridging this employability gap – Merit Trac www.merittrac.com which is into talent mapping and skills assessments and Silicon India www.siliconindia.com that provides the platform to connect,coach and build talent assets through an online approach.

Talent networks in my opinion will become the next generation platforms for progress.

A talent network provides a technology platform that allows companies and individuals to communicate with each other and get engaged in a more trusted environment.Just as ATM’s and credit cards have become a platform that allows cash to be dispensed to bank customers from locations distant from traditional banks or paying without cash , Talent Networks will work as the next ATM’s for encashing talent.

I am excited about Merit Trac and Silicon India being a part of the SSPA study on Talent Management in Emerging Markets.Madan Padaki ,Founder Director for Meritrac is authoring the best practice on Talent Mapping.

Talking about the second force that could bring change is “Social Entrepreneurship”.To help explain this I would like to share a perspective I got after I read a book – “The Next Global Stage” by Kenichi Ohmae (Wharton School Publishing)

Kenichi refers in his book (page 156) – “A number of aid projects in the Pondicherry area in South India are providing literacy education”… to the downtrodden sections of society.”It is not tradional words and numbers literacy.It is computers literacy.” These young boys and girls are being prepared for becoming the employees of tomorrow.

Knowing where talent resides and caching them in a network and to keep them engaged is the most trusted and reliable form of attracting and hiring talent.But most corporates are still in the number crunching stage where urgent need for replacements and incremental hires is not able to take the Hiring Engine from the “transactional” gear to the next level of mapping and developing people to be hired not today but for tomorrow.

- Dheeraj Prasad

Talent Reclamation

I recently read an article on “Capturing Talent” that was published in the Economist Newspaper .

http://70.86.150.130/financialexpress/ArticleImage.aspx?article=23_08_2007_007_001&gb_W=1456&gb_H=2066

The article is about skill shortage in Asian countries across industry verticals.The opening lines of this article unfurls a compelling story.

“It SEEMS odd.In the world’s most populous regions the biggest problem facing employers is a shortage of people”.

This thought made me remember the old story which I had heard many years back of two sales representatives of a Shoe Company who went to an African country to study the market potential.The story goes like this…

“The first sales rep saw the people in that country bare foot and came back and reported lack of market potential and a problem.The second sales rep went to the same country and also saw people bare foot and reported an opportunity to sell his company’s shoes”.

 That made me think of “Reclamation” a concept well known in the physical world of Land and Real Estate.Land Reclamation we all know is a way to build and develop physical assets.Similarly “Talent Reclamation” is a way to build and develop the soft infrastructure of an enterprise. 

What does reclamation mean?

The dictionary definition is – “the conversion of wasteland into land suitable for use of habitation or cultivation”.We have seen in the last few years , millions of tonnes of earth being moved to reclaim land and build the hard infrastructure in countries like India and China which is today the new Asian home to many global companies.

I see the next phase of reclamation happening around the softer component around Talent.

So how would this work?

Let us take India’s example which has two key assets – Agriculture and Manpower.

We saw in the last decade or two many enterprises that capitalized on the agricultural produce and turn this asset into a marketable output.The growth and success of the Food Processing Industry is well known in India which many companies like the Uniliver and Nestle’s of the world drove here.

I see Talent Processing as the next wave of opportunity to fuel the world wide need for talent.Emerging Markets will lead this new talent centred economy.And just as many core infrastructure projects in the area of telecom,Airports and Inter state highways are funded by global consortiums , Talent Development would need a similar global commitment and investment.

Talent Reclamation will happen with the right collaborative efforts of the enterprise and the academia.The business stakes are high enough to keep it limited to individual effort.The collective effort of global corporations and local intelligence should trigger the change to build an education based talent economy.

Dheeraj Prasad

Talent Life Cycle

Talent Life Cycle is in many ways similar to a Product Life Cycle. Life Cycles help us to understand the entire end-to-end spectrum of a process from the cradle to the grave.

Necessity is the mother of all inventions and all innovations emanate from an idea that is born. I talked about it in my last post on “Globalization and birth of new talent”. The new kid on the block this time is this piece of organizational asset that I would address as “Brand You”. Tom Peters coined this term as far back as 1997 in an article titled “The Brand Called You”. He went on to author a book on the same subject “The Brand You50″.Talent Life Cycle is a management process to enhance the value of “Brand You”.

I have described Talent Life Cycle as a 3 stage process as shown above..

Talent Attraction

Brands are supposed to attract and have a value proposition that will become the compelling reason for others to follow. Great products have a great brand pull and personalization that goes with it. Similarly we have “Personal” “Brand” “Equity” as much as any other brand like Coca-Cola as Tom Peters puts it. Managing this asset should look at adding value to the “Brand You” that individuals come with. Role Modeling as a part of the brand building is a good starting point for organizations to build a value proposition for emerging talent.

Talent Development

Good products reinvent themselves and develop what the customers want. Product strategies work on version enhancements and add new value to themselves.”Brand You” also goes through the same cycle of version enhancements and development cycles to generate the next value in the life cycle. Good talent development practices roll out value boosters in the life cycle to showcase the equity that “Brand You” is building on. The impact is the same as the famous Hawthorne effect that showed a team of welders the importance of the weld in holding the space shuttle together in orbit.

Talent Engagement & Succession Planning

Products stabilize, integrate in the eco system and get recognized for the value they add.”Brand You” also integrates and transforms into the larger gamut of organizational branding which I call as”Brand Us”. At this stage the product is at its pinnacle of success.

Brands succeed when they are anchored in the environment they grow in and become synonymous with the practice itself. For e.g. the way Xerox as a brand became synonymous with photocopying. Organizations can build good to great talent management practices if they anchor the identity of “Brand You” in the work space.

Products transform to the next level of build and so does Talent. There is an EOL – “End of Life” phase for products. Talent Life Cycle also ends with a succession roadmap which helps to proactively transition an old version with a new one just as an exiting talent works toward ushering a new talent that is born and nourished to take over.

- Dheeraj

The Growth Story

As I gaze out from my office window at the ever-burgeoning skyline, it seemed only yesterday that the same view from his window was a barren landscape of stone and earth. But now there stood spanking new buildings boasting the world’s biggest names in Information Technology. Again, it seemed only yesterday that we started with a chosen set of managers with a mandate to grow. And today, after just 20 months of operations we are counted amongst global best, servicing clients around the globe on Enterprise Products & Technologies.

Much like the landscape, the growth was spectacular, but the journey had been strong, steady and measured “Brick-by-brick…Man-by-man”. This story has been repeated over and over by many companies, any many of our emerging regions globally. The growth being dictated by many compelling business factors: the availability of a technically skilled and productive labor pool, cost effectiveness of operations and government support.

For a Support engineer, the work is challenging and the complexities unusual. It requires her to provide support on a complex and vast product which run critical business operations. The customer base is global and with a product coverage spanning different industries, the business diversity is large. The nature of the work calls for high diversity in skill requirement – from deep technical knowledge, to the softer but equally complex aspects of customer management – all through a virtual medium.

Knowledge as a Service – Talent Development as a Process

The IT industry is growing at a blistering pace, and for any organization living in these best of times, what is critical to its performance is how quickly it could scale up a new employee’s knowledge levels to full operational delivery. The skill building process is a critical element in capability management, and a strong process around this would lead to rapid growth and success

People Focus, effective integration

A young employee-set in a knowledge industry calls for more in everything associated with work-life. More of work, more diversity in work, more intellectual challenges, more growth. Managing such a dynamic workforce, and working with them to deliver world-class results is a challenge. To keep focus, it is important to ensure that every employee is aligned directly to a set of tightly integrated objectives at the organizational level.

The Road Ahead

As the industry is transforming itself from selling software products, to making the service offering the main customer proposition, product support is being moved closer and closer towards the customer. It is time to shift to the next gear and orient the mindset of the organization further to mange in this fluid environment. The key advantage of a young and dynamic center needs to be leveraged to adapt itself quickly to current realities.

As these thoughts run through my mind I am suddenly shaken out of my thoughts by the ring of my cell phone. It was my daughter, gently rebuking me for keeping late in office. ‘There are times when one must lead, and there are times when one must follow’, as I press the shutdown button on my laptop. My car joins hundreds of others on their way home, the gleaming skyline slowly fading away in the rear-view mirror.

Tomorrow would bring another challenge… Tomorrow would bring another opportunity…

Rajeev Shroff

Talent management in Global Services.

According to the Harvard Business Review, “The most successful brand cultures offer a single, coherent story where the components work together in a synergistic fashion so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”.

Services is one entity that makes all the components work together in a harmonic state. Did you know that technical service expertise is one of the most critical factors enterprise customers use to select a vendor?

Some important trends in the IT marketplace…

Services has become an important facet of overall revenue.
Quality support relationships help customers to use their products more effectively and resolve critical issues.
As IT professionals expertise remain scarce, customers will look to software vendors to provide greater support services.
As market matures, vendors focus more closely on long-term customer loyalty, and support is critical in this focus.
Satisfaction experienced through the support relationship builds customer loyalty and trust, which leads to greater potential for repeat business.
Greater focus on business benefit and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).
Companies becoming more service oriented.
Pressure on software vendors to prove benefit of products.
Support/maintenance are increasing basis for relationship.
Shift from product purchase toward services model.
Service is more than a static single-transaction purchased product .
Established installations require support/maintenance long after initial sale.

Statistically speaking, Customers will spend more time with a service organization than with any other group within an IT provider.

Emerging markets are redefining the entire service industry by offering a vast technical talent pool to meet the demands of the IT customer. We need to make sure the above details are being propogated to the talent bases in making them aware of their unlimited potential.

The Best practices study on Talent Management has a mix of creative minds with various background that can help deliver this message across all emerging markets. I feel privileged to be a part of this team …

- Ramesh

Globalization and birth of new talent

Globalization has no borders. History is testimony of the fact that human civilization has progressed through continuous exploration of economic and human resources and by making products and services available to its customers.

The silk route, a widespread network of caravan ways that crossed Europe and Asia from the Mediterranean coast to China in ancient times and middle Ages probably marked the beginning of globalization as it enhanced business relations and cultural exchanges between the East and West. The “silk route” in the current scenario is being paved by the telecom under sea fibre optic cables that has wired the world. The fibre optic system carries data and digitized voices much farther and faster in larger quantities. This enabled a new form of global collaboration and is transforming the way customer experience is getting streamed on a virtual mode. This indeed has transcended time and geographical boundaries to deliver seamless experience to customers.

A new Talent profile in the fibre optic enabled world has already taken birth. This talent virtually sails the digital seas to work with customers anywhere on the globe, drives a high end technology machine that runs on a culturally neutral gear and works and collaborates with people twice his experience. Talent Management of this asset is as critical as the line of code that goes into building a program or an application. The best practices study on Talent Management in Emerging Markets will help in writing the line of code that will build a people program to help translate it into an end application of building customer loyalty.

Looking forward to working with all of you on this project.

Dheeraj

Best Practices for Managing Talent in Emerging Markets

As the VP of Member Programs at the SSPA, I have the privilege of interacting with dozens of technology companies and learning about the challenges and initiatives they have underway to improve and optimize their support operations.  Not surprisingly, the issues and goals are often very similar; how can we improve our CSAT scores while reducing total expenses?   What are the latest innovations in support technology?  How do we get better customer usage of self-service capabilities?  And more recently, how do I effectively manage my technical support resources in remote and emerging markets? 

As more and more companies begin to globalize their support businesses, they are seeking new sources of technical talent who can provide needed coverage and deliver a great customer experience.   Yet the challenges of establishing operations in emerging markets like India and China are substantial, and many companies struggle to achieve the full potential of reduced costs and streamlined operations that are the allure of offshoring and outsourcing strategies.  One of the greatest challenges organizations face is managing the front-line staff they employ to represent their companies to customers and provide quality technical support. 

To help address this challenge, the SSPA has chartered a new working committee to establish best practices and shared industry resources that can be used to help streamline and reduce the risks of establishing operations in emerging markets.  We have assembled a high-powered team of support leaders from around the world who together are looking at the best ways to attract, develop, engage and retain support staff, looking initially at India and China.   The team is privileged to be chaired by Dheeraj Prasad, a support executive for Microsoft based in Bangalore who brings not only local understanding of the challenges being faced broadly by our industry, but a passion for technical support and an ability to engage peers to support the committee’s efforts that has produced very impressive results in a short period of time.  I invite you to share your thoughts on this topic and join the committee as we endeavor to create a toolset of best practices, frameworks and resources that can be used by SSPA members worldwide to help ensure the success of establishing and running support operations in emerging markets.      

Trisha Bright, VP Member Programs, SSPA