Human Resources Skillsets for the 2020s
Jon has been interviewed by CMSWire on the HR / HR tech skills required in the 2020s. These are his suggestions:
Digital immersion. I prefer to use the digital visitor / resident spectrum to the digital native / immigrant one. There’s not much someone can do about not being a native, and even if they are, it doesn’t mean they will be digitally savvy. But all HR and especially HR tech specialists can and should be digital residents. There is so much opportunity for digital technologies to transform HR tech and specialists need to be on top of this. The easiest way of doing so is to use the technologies. Eg many of the potential benefits of AI may be limited and debatable so far, but we should still be experimenting with them. We need to develop their use in an agile, iterative fashion, so we should get involved now, in order that we are able to access their benefits once the technologies are more mature.
Wisdom artistry. There are lots of calls for HR to employ data scientists and businesses do need to have or ensure access to data science specialists. However, this isn’t the main need in HR. Data is important but much of our data, especially about the most important aspects of people and organisations, is qualitative and subjective in nature. The required capabilities are not so much about understanding data as they are about drawing insights from this and other evidence, plus calibrated intuition. And then making a case based upon these insights, including through story telling. So it’s an art not a science, and is focused on wisdom not data. Plus AI will quickly take over operational analytics, and so the key skills for HR tech are about understanding the potential use of data, not doing the analysis on it.
Experience orientation. The key opportunity for HR tech today is to help employees improve their own productivity, performance and wellbeing. For example, HR needs to avoid any temptation to use increasing amounts of data to monitor and manage people more tightly, but instead, provide the insights from analytics on this data to individual employees who will often be placed to make best use of it. HR tech specialists therefore need to be deeply immersed in their organisations, close to their people as well as the business, and with a desire and curiosity to understand how people could be supported better. This orientation is supported by natural empathy for their people, and knowledge of general principles from psychology, sociology and anthropology.
What would you suggest?
