HR Learning: 26 Jan, 2024

1.

Tata Technologies offers career opportunities to finalists of InnoVent2023

34 team members from the top 10 teams were offered an opportunity to begin their careers at Tata Technologies. InnoVent, the hackathon organised by Tata Technologies, saw 2,696 engineering students from about 229 colleges across the country participating. A whopping 814 unique project submissions were received. The best part was that job opportunities were offered to all the finalists. The first edition of Tata Technologies InnoVent was launched in July 2023 to inspire young engineering students across India to showcase their creativity and innovate solutions for the manufacturing industry, across areas such as electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles, cybersecurity, generative artificial intelligence (GAI), and the Internet of Things (IoT). The Grand Finale Demo Day took place at the global product engineering and digital services company’s headquarters in Hinjawadi, Pune, where the Top 10 teams presented their prototypes. The three winning teams received cash prizes worth Rs 4.5 lakhs, while all the top 10 finalists were offered career opportunities at Tata Technologies. Subject matter experts (SMEs) from Tata Technologies mentored the teams for over 590 hours via workshops and training sessions to enable them to scale their ideas.

2.

HR leaders on strengthening L&D in 2024

In the realm of Learning and Development, the correlation with organisational success is undeniable. As companies adapt to the ever-evolving business terrain, HR leaders are steering the ship toward constant growth and excellence. It’s a matter of yesteryear when people used to work in the same role for ages. The evolving work landscape has created the need for constant learning.

Companies are also strategising and aligning their learning and development with their business needs. Investing in learning and development to shape a bright future, HR leaders are embracing the journey of continuous growth and excellence.

According to "The 2023 State of Learning and Development" by Virti, L & D positively influences the revenue of an organisation.

Learning and development play a vital role in attracting and retaining talent, and motivating and engaging them. It is equally important for employer branding, and developing people's capabilities and value-based culture.

Hyper-personalised learning paths, embracing generative AI, and AI-assisted coding are some of the trends anticipated to define Learning and Development in 2024.

3.

Solving the skills gap

Skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies. But this ‘currency’ depreciates rapidly - what's the way forward? Everywhere skills transform lives, generate prosperity and promote social inclusion. And if there is one lesson the global financial crisis had taught us in the late 2000s, then it is that we cannot simply bail ourselves out of economic turmoil, stimulate ourselves out of a recession or just print money our way out of a crisis.  A much stronger bet for countries to grow and develop in the long run is to equip the working population with better skills to collaborate, compete and connect in ways that drive their lives and their societies. The current pandemic has dramatically reinforced this, changing skill demands overnight and creating huge demands for just-in-time adult learning. OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills shows that what people know, and what they do with what they know, has a major impact on their life chances. On average across countries, the median hourly wage of workers scoring at Level 4 or 5 in literacy — who can make complex inferences and evaluate subtle truth claims or arguments in written texts — is more than 60% higher than for workers scoring at the baseline Level 1. The survey also shows that this impact goes far beyond earnings and employment. In the countries surveyed, individuals with poorer foundation skills are far more likely to report poor health, to believe that they have little impact on political processes, and not to participate in associative or volunteer activities. In one way, skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies. But this ‘currency’ depreciates rapidly as the requirements of labour markets evolve and individuals lose the skills they do not use. For skills to retain their value, they must be continuously developed throughout life. In a fast-changing world, lifelong learning has become the key to solving the skills gap, which is about constantly learning, unlearning and relearning when the context changes. We used to learn to do the work, now learning has become the work. To succeed with converting education into better jobs and lives, we need to better understand what those skills are that drive outcome, ensure that the right skill mix is being learned over the lifecycle, and help economies make good use of those skills.