Digital talent acquisition for transformation acceleration

Digital talent is in high demand and many companies struggle to recruit digital professionals fast enough to support their digitalization. Successful digital transformation requires creative approaches to digital talent acquisition.

Digitalization has been a global megatrend across industries for quite some time. Yet, the COVID-19 crisis has further increased companies’ investments in digital. According to McKinsey Global Survey of executives [1], companies across sectors have accelerated the adoption of digital technologies by several years.

COVID-19 has forced companies to focus on the fast digitalization of their customer interactions, improve and broaden their digital offerings, and increase the use of technology to secure effective internal operations during times of remote work. These focus areas have been critical for companies to maintain business during COVID-19, but are inadequate to create competitive advantage in the long run.

During the last 1,5 years the focus has been to build new solutions quickly to respond to the challenges caused by the pandemic. Once COVID-19 restrictions start to become a thing of the past, companies are redirecting their focus to prepare for the future. Today, companies need to figure out how customer behavior has changed, what are the customer needs that need to be addressed, and how these experiences need to be produced to be competitive in the future.

We see that companies across industries are determined to build sustainable competitive advantage by investing in core digital capabilities and delivering increased value to customers. We can see the investments spreading to four domains:

1.      Enablers: Companies are renewing their enterprise resource planning systems, increasing cloud adoption, improving API management, building data platforms, and developing agile and DevOps practices to create the enablers needed for digitalization.

2.      Operational efficiency: Companies are looking to drive efficiencies across the business from production and logistics to support functions and customer processes – especially through simplification and business process automation.

3.      Customer experience: Companies continue to focus on increasing value generation for the customers and by doing so increasing customer lifetime value for their business. Continued adoption of design thinking to increase customer centricity and further improvements in digital services and tools across the end-to-end customer lifecycle are high on the management agenda.

4.      New business innovation: Companies across industries are looking for new business areas for growth. Some companies are expanding business through new business models (e.g. platform business) and digital services to build new revenue streams, form joint ventures and collaborate with start-ups, invest in new early stage companies, and acquire companies to drive innovation and business growth.

IMAGE 1. DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION FOCUS AREAS OF LEADING COMPANIES

According to the survey by McKinsey the top reason for successful realization of COVID-19 digitalization initiatives has been the availability of talent. We see that digital talent acquisition is and will be a top concern to drive competitive advantage through digital. Few companies have adequate digital competencies in house, finding digital professionals is difficult, and training competences to existing people takes time.

Digital talent can become a bottleneck for digital transformation execution if the acquisition of talent is not considered a key strategic issue and success factor. Digital transformation resourcing strategies need to consider critical in-house competencies as well as the successful completion of digitalization programs. Among the questions to ask are:

·        What are the strategic competence areas that need to be built in-house to be successful in the future?

·        How can we accelerate the development of these competences? For example, are we able to recruit and grow existing talent fast enough? Or should we hire interim professionals to boost our learning?

·        Which digitalization projects are critical to be led and primarily resourced by internal people, and where are external professionals the solution to resource bottlenecks?

·        Which digitalization projects can be executed by partners with end-to-end delivery responsibility?

To successfully execute their digital strategies, companies need to be creative in the systematic build-up of competences in areas of high demand. These competence areas include experienced software developers, solution architects, cloud experts, data scientists, data engineers, business and service designers and digital business leaders. The growing base of experienced freelancers is one source of talent that is increasingly part of companies’ resourcing strategies.

NeXec supports its customers in their digital transformation journeys by offering highly qualified digital professionals from NeXec’s network of freelancers.

 IMAGE 2. DIGITAL COMPETENCE AREAS IN HIGH DEMAND

 Source:

[1] McKinsey Global Survey of executives, Online survey, July 2020