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'Need to build digital talent from schools, universities to fill huge shortage'

Companies globally are massively short of digital talent, says Gregor Theisen, senior partner and managing partner of digital, McKinsey-Asia Pacific. Rica Bhattacharyya talks to Theisen and Kushe Bahl, partner and leader, digital and analytics practice, India at McKinsey about the digital talent landscape, emerging roles, challenges that companies are facing and preparedness of leadership teams to embark on the digital transformation journey.

Edited excerpts:

What are the new digital specialist roles that you are seeing companies create as they get more digital?
Kushe Bahl: The most visible elements of digital transformation roadmap include—new digital businesses, process transformation, advanced analytics and behind the scene where there are people driving it. The dream team to make it happen has four components: specialist talent, translators (people who are in the company and learning about how digital works), leadership, and around all this is the agile organisation. There are eight specialist skillsets—digital product management, experienced designers, visual designers, solution architects, data scientists, data architects, digital marketers and scrum masters.

How important is the role of a cybersecurity specialist in a company’s digital transformation?
Gregor Theisen: Cybersecurity specialists are becoming increasingly important to ringfence a company that is on a digital transformation. Historically, a traditional incumbent company is not used to exposing the company to the outside ecosystem through digital and they are easily attackable. And hence these roles are becoming important to protect the company, customer and brand.

Tell us about the talent landscape for digital, globally and in India?
Theisen: At a global level, companies are short of talent by 50-100x. Companies need to build their own training capabilities. Educating and building the staff is important. Governments also need to start thinking about the education system—curriculums at schools, universities need to be looked at. India has the advantage of being the outsourcing hub and therefore having the technical talent which is at a much larger scale than others. There is a huge opportunity for India to fill the global talent gap and that might be a great opportunity for business itself in being the hub of digital enabling of global companies.

Bahl: We are talent rich and talent poor at the same time. Talent rich because we have a lot of tech and design talent. But the stuff that they have worked on are not the cutting-edge digital transformation stuff. The real cutting-edge work is actually being done by the startup community. So, we are finding a route where old tech talent is going to startups or start something on their own, and then comes out digitally qualified and trained. So, there is a large pool but then it is a narrow pipe that comes out digitally savvy and trained. That’s a challenge companies are facing.

How prepared are the leadership teams for digital transformation? Is there a need for mindset change?
Theisen: There are 4-5 significant changes. Historically, many companies have done waterfall planning which means they do a lot of analysis and testing and only when they are 100% sure they launch a product. But that takes too long in the new world. What you have to do in the new world is minimum viable product—you need to get it out in 8-10-week cycles. Leadership has to be ready to accept quick failures and encourage the teams to continue learning from it. Second, you need to be aware of and judge on problems you don’t understand and make decisions in areas where you are not 100% competent. Third, you should be able to constantly adapt your strategy to the changes and be able to do constant course correction. The last one, you need to be a brilliant team player.

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