By Kamal Bali

In the last few months, while countries are desperate to flatten the curve, Coronavirus has been changing its epicentre and affecting millions directly, and billions indirectly, by clutching both at health and economy at the same time. It is hard to ignore both the disruptive nature of the ongoing pandemic and the simultaneous transformations being affected by emerging technologies. We are also receiving some important lessons in humanity – of mutual trust, of care for all including mother earth, of respect for dignity of labour and to find the delicate balance between life & livelihood.

It is time we created an inclusive and humane future by taking informed and conscious decisions. And, there is a special challenge in the Indian circumstance – keeping in mind our diversity and contrasts. However, the new era beholds immense opportunities for India because of its oft enumerated strengths.

Do we take the Digital & Industry 4.0 path?

To create wealth for its people, India needs to fire all its growth engines. For that to happen, we need to be competitive – as a market, as well as a global supplier. Emerging digital technologies will help to optimize operations more efficiently –using less resources, minimizing waste and environment footprint.

India with its digitally informed and skilled workforce stands to gain a lot. A chance to lead the innovation-driven economy. However, all this comes with two key concerns – the loss of some existing jobs as well as the need for upskilling and reskilling for the new jobs. Therefore, there are two important imperatives:

• Making Indian manufacturing ready for the future
• Generating Jobs for the 10m+ workforce each year.

Creating learning organizations: While we are concerned with the consequences of Digitalisation and Industry 4.0, this is not new. Consider this – Volvo Trucks from being mostly mechanical units, less than two decades back, now include software codes that – if written on A4 sheets – would pile up to the height of Eiffel Tower. The shift to electro-mobility demanded that our engineers learn new competencies in the areas of motors and batteries. New safety technologies such as ADAS, Emergency Braking& Platooning require strengths in the domains of Connectivity, AI, Machine Learning and a host of emerging tech solutions. This requires the need to establish a method for continuous learning and upskilling.

A Learning & Development Eco-system: Not all organisations will set up their own training resources. Here a country-level collaborative eco-system (may be on PPP mode) in emerging technologies can help all in learning, as well as establishing a direction, setting standards, with a shared vision.

Culture and Vision for the Future is key: Emerging technologies are disruptive. This means employees will need to go beyond their own competency domains, would need to collaborate with new partners and stakeholders. If the organisation culture is not ready for this – it could cause insecurities and resistance.

A new culture in Industrial relationships too : Manufacturing has anchored several countries like Germany, Japan, South Korea for several decades, imbibing the principles of automation and higher productivity, through good collaboration between unions and employers. India can follow the same path.

India Inc. should choose its own pace: The fact remains that labour costs in India is still low; we have an abundant workforce population and we have a large number of MSME’s which may like to seek the right balance, pace and investment for future.

Catering to the future workforce of India: India needs to create jobs for about 10 million youth every year. The education and skilling system needs a reset as 50% of our workforce drops out before secondary education. Clearly, our learner’s pipeline is out of sync with industry needs and this has to be fixed.

So, how do we rationalise this dilemma? The answer lies in not resisting the future but, instead, organising ourselves to take advantage of it by:

Creating Aspiration & Branding for Skill Based Training: We need mass scale awareness to make future workforce aware of the upcoming skills required coupled with avenues where they can get trained.

Starting early to offer digitisation experience: Our future workforce will come from those in the current age group of 1-14. We need school curriculums to make them comfortable with aspects of digitalisation.

Corporates Offering on-the-job training: The most lasting learning happens on-the-job and who better to offer it than the industry itself.

Collaborative Skill Development infrastructure: It is important that the missions of academia, government and industry are aligned – joining hands in building the common direction as well as jointly investing into the infra.

Creating the future trainers: Not only the future employees, but we need to regularly upskill the teachers and trainers

We live in a VUCA world where the future is likely to be even more disruptive, affecting lives and livelihoods. The one thing we can do is to create organisations that empower employees to learn and build capacity, thereby building a nation that comes together to offer learning opportunities and a road-ahead for the millions of children today who will become the workforce of tomorrow. And, this will not happen merely by good intentions, but through missions and synchronised movements for the transformation to a new culture. A culture of learning, inclusivity and sustainable development.