"The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways" - Robert Greene

If we go back in time, we can recall that the focus of employees used to be only on technical skill. But now we can see that the same set of participants are undergoing domain knowledge, soft skills, and negotiation skills to have good product and process knowledge. Today nobody wants a singular kind of specialization that continues to remain the core. However, there are adjacency skills in the market and has been building the expectation in the industry for many, many years. There are very candid and exclusive efforts taken to ensure that there is a need for holistic development to build multiple skills, irrespective of the organization. One can't just be technically sound, or behaviorally sound, it has to be a techno-behavioral competency that L&D folks have been concentrating on, for the past four or five years. And that's why the composite skills are not only meant for employees, it is also meant for L&D heads to improve and develop the overall progression.
Let’s have a look at the four industry leaders sharing their take on the composite skills in correspondence to their respective organizations.

Deepak Kumar Arora, Head Learning and Development at Birlasoft believes that the need for composite skills is not a new thing. The need for having multiple skills, from an IT industry perspective, is that every organization wants to move from basic kind of engagements to a managed services kind of engagements. And that is where they need to look at resource optimization for individuals having multiple skills to be able to give an end-to-end solution. For the first two years, fresh employees need to focus on self working as a team member to get the organizational context. But when they reach managerial level, the flavor changes. A lot of focus is needed for them in the kind of power/behavioral skills to develop coaching skills, empathy, team motivation, etc.

Chetna Munshi, Director - Global DEI Learning and Transformation at Ericsson Composite skills are nothing new but at the same time have been called out recently because everybody understands the kind of importance these extra skills hold. At Ericsson, they call it power skills, considering the importance in the technology sector. But at the same time if organizations don’t show any value in pursuing these skills, however attractive it would be, they will still require a lot of push from the employees to get onboard with it. So this is a thing that all senior management have to keep in mind. At Ericsson, they have also created a lot of certification roadmaps, where again, power skills have been clubbed into part of it.

Dr. Sonal Sushil Modi,Vice President, Enterprise Technology Learning - Learning & Insights Team at Mastercard has heard about adjacency skills, right model of learning, power skills, and all of these are nothing but composite skills. It's not about industry, or organizations, it is the need of the hour, because it is an holistic competency development that organizations are looking at. One can be really strong with technology but when it comes to behavior skills, or when it comes to articulation, communication, or storytelling skills, many fail miserably. That's exactly what composite skills are all about, it's all encompassing, not overwhelming. It's also very critical for L&D folks to understand, while they we create this kind of culture of building composite skills for employees, it's also important to give that kind of platform and hand holding to them, because nobody wants core to be lost.

Gen Y and Gen z's know what will bring them to the top level of career and therefore they're willing to explore opportunities of learning something additional beyond, over and above their core skills. It's important for learning and development folks or fraternity to understand that, how do they campaign this. So reward recognition is a good way. However, monetizing those rewards is not a good way of doing things. It is more about opportunities given to them, it is more about how they grow and scale up and career.

Anisha Bhardwaj, Head of learning and capability at British telecom-GBS composite skills, rescaling and everything has been in the system for quite some time. But now it's becoming overwhelming to the employees. There are so many interventions today that are happening at an organization level. Critical skills, problem solving skills, presentation skills are part of any role and it's making clear to everybody in the organization that you can't really move into any other role unless you have the basic skills. With great resignations, building multi skill culture as a pipeline looks a promising solution.

The importance of power skills actually gets magnified

The moment one transitions from middle level to a senior level, it is all about power skills. It requires influencing its stakeholders, management, team building, coaching, giving feedback to the team, etc. So it can be clearly seen that power skill is there throughout the career journey, irrespective of when you are entering or when you're in the middle management or when you are in the leadership role. Post-pandemic, these skills training also changed since offices moved towards a hybrid mode. Less is more is a concept that organizations are adopting, and focus on the top three business priorities, strategic business priorities, and put all the muscles around building that kind of content and learning opportunities.

Neeti Sharma concluded the discussion by saying; “the equation between business, L&D and HR has changed in the last two years. I think the dependencies also increased tremendously which is a good thing.” The core skills that are required from a fresher definitely has to be at the center stage and that will not change ever, because that's what organizations want. But the overarching skills, the peripheral skills, which are a must today needs to be identified. There has to be a hand in glove partnership between the industries and the academies to make degree apprenticeship work. Watch the full discussion here.