According to a study, seventy-nine per cent of executives agree that the future of work will be project-based rather than role-based. You may wonder, why is this such a crucial aspect to consider? The reason being, work is becoming more project-oriented means people are no longer expected to excel in a single skill simply. The coming of AI and automation roles are drastically changing jobs to become more holistic, and the significant impact of this is seen in the IT sector.
In the past few decades, the IT industry was on a hiring spree due to the ease of setting up businesses in India. This led to more and more engineering colleges coming up, and thousands of IT graduates getting hefty packages. Until, the emergence of AI completely changed the employment scenario with widespread automation across industries. While the world out kept rapidly progressing, sadly, the educational background hasn’t changed much, which leads to a skill-gap in the current economy.
The need for coaching in the IT sector
Technological Unemployment has become a wide-known phenomenon across the globe. While people may not exactly know the right term, they sure know the effect of it. Technological Unemployment refers to people losing their jobs because of machines that can produce the same result. It is a concept under the umbrella of Structural Unemployment that is caused by a mismatch of skills between the unemployed and available jobs. This type of Technological Unemployment is spotted mainly in the IT sector as machines are widely used in those divisions.
The World Economic Forum survey states, over a third of the core skill sets in most businesses, will be replaced by new ones by 2020. In the midst of skill gap, another gap of soft skills exists that needs to be catered to. Collaborative problem solving is said to be the must-have skill of the future for effective workspaces. Coaching will help employees in gaining the soft skills needed to get through technological changes and support the team to achieve targets. A lack of understanding of how to deal with disruptive changes will be the first barrier to this disruption. In such a situation, it is essential to train the current workforce and guide them through these drastically changing time. Mentoring and coaching are the two main aspects to focus on while promoting change in organizations.
The effect of coaching
Overcoming the fear of threats from machines
One of the crucial aspects that coaching focuses on is facilitating self-discovery and problem-solving. Before the candidates even begin to adopt new skills, they need first to understand their potential and then leverage it efficiently. This is where coaches step in. While mentors mostly focus on giving advice, coaches assist people in identifying the best solution options based on the problem the candidate brings to the table. Through powerful questions, they are able to unearth the core reasons for their problem and prepare an action plan for it. Organizations face massive pushback from employees when a new system is introduced because employees always see new-technologies as a threat to their jobs. This leads them to stay back and not adapt to changing times, costing companies their profits. Coaches help the candidate first to overcome the fear and then discover their true potential and the skill-sets they can actively work on.
Stress management
There’s no denying the fact that we live in extremely stressed times. As per finding, 19% or almost one in five respondents had quit a previous position because of job stress and nearly one in four have been driven to tears because of workplace stress. In such circumstances, employees need to have coaches that can help them sail through turbulent times swiftly by coaching them around aspects of stress management, mindfulness, conflict resolution among others.
Upgrading managerial skills
While employees are going through such skill transformations, the ownership of training them falls on the managers. Since managers have worked with the teams, they need to identify which of the employees need re-skilling and which ones need up-skilling. Managers need to design the culture of workplaces and that’s where assistance from coaches will help them in areas like conflict management, emotional intelligence, personal productivity etc.
Conclusion
Colin Parris, the vice president of Software Research at GE says, “The only way to fight [job losses], is to train the talent that we have. Because in the future, we have to embrace robotics. It allows us to reduce cost. If I reduce cost, I have more money then I can use for innovation. The more money I have, the more new products I can create. The more products I create, the more workforce I can hire.” This is precisely why we need to focus on the workforce and help them upgrade their skills as per changing times. And in this journey of rapid change, coaching is the partner that you need to team up with.
