Even before there was a coronavirus pandemic, boards ranked digital/technology disruption as their top business priority for 2020 — followed by obtaining the talent needed to execute tech transformation. But COVID-19 has escalated digital initiatives into digital imperatives, creating urgent pressure on HR leaders to work with their CEO, CFO and CIO to rethink skills needs as business models change at light speed.

It’s no easy task for this cohort to identify and acquire the digital skills their organization needs to pursue digital transformation as imagined post-COVID-19. And now companies must press forward under a new reality: Technology skill and talent are no longer highly centered in IT; they need to be “marbled” across organizational functions and businesses and coupled with soft skills to achieve transformation success.  

Digital transformation speeds up and spreads

By some estimates, response to the pandemic has fast-forwarded digital adoption by five years. One result of this “digitalization at scale and velocity” is massive skill shifts. The shift in skill and talent needs was already a challenge, but more than 58% of workforces report skill transformations since the onset of the pandemic. 

Many leaders are ill-equipped to manage the fallout. The very business leaders who already lagged in making the digital leap are often the same ones we’re depending on to hire and develop future-forward strategies to cope with this change. 

If senior leaders can’t solve this puzzle, they won’t be able to deploy and align the right type or amount of skills to address the shifts in work trends, processes and organizational structures that fuel digital transformation. 

Data shows demand for digital skills keeps expanding

In 2019, data from Gartner TalentNeuron already showed an outsized number of technologists being hired outside of IT. That trend is only accelerating as organizations demand digital skill and talent far beyond the IT function and deep into other areas of the business.

You can see this in the figure below, which shows data on job postings by non-technology companies tied to skills around artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and data science/analytics.

Catching up with tech companies on critical skills

Pandemic response has already driven radical and lasting change in work trends, including shifts around remote and contingent work and critical skill needs. But as executive leaders reset their digital business strategy, the talent strategy will need to serve the chosen end state. 

Companies that were poised for digital transformation before COVID-19 are quickly distancing themselves from analog companies, and the rest are scrambling to catch up. 

Even if non technology companies don’t need employees to be quite so digitally literate as the tech giants, they will need to identify their requisite skills and prioritize a way to acquire them. This is especially critical if they hope to unlock the value of the competitive advantage embedded in the reimagined business model. 

Ways to redeploy talent resources

Whatever the value proposition is for customers and other external stakeholders, every organization will need employees to function in a more digitalized environment — where decision making and workflows are constantly changing.

Even before COVID-19, HR leaders rated the emergence of new tasks as their top disruptor and commonly said they struggled to plan for future talent needs. The pandemic has confirmed what many already knew: Legacy ways of working are outdated.

Talent resources are increasingly misaligned with work processes and organizational structures. And the traditional approach to allocating talent — using episodic overhauls and adjustments — simply isn’t agile enough for today’s fast-changing conditions.

Ultimately, talent planning has to move resourcing closer to the end user, making it easier for employees to act on changing needs — and helping to keep resources from getting stuck in less-productive projects. 

For HR leaders to anticipate and plan for these types of shifts in skill needs and organizational and workflow design, they will have to evolve far beyond talent-plan executors (last to know, first to be blamed). Instead, they must be digital change agents, proactively driving talent strategy in concert with their C-suite partners.

Scott Engler is VP, Advisory for CFO/CHRO and evangelist for Gartner TalentNeuron™. Scott works with companies to plan for the future of the workforce and the capabilities they will need to give them a competitive advantage as AI, massive skill changes and the gig economy come on line. He also works with CFOs and CHROs on strategy, board relations, talent planning, business performance management, analytics and leadership.

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