In FY24, India added over 1,700 Global Capability Centres (GCC), bringing the total count to nearly 3,000 – more than any other nation on the planet, according to data from global consulting firm Zinnov.
Cumulatively, they generated $64.8 billion, with a CAGR of 9.8% – meaning, by 2030, GCCs in India will be generating close to $105 billion in revenue and employing nearly 3 million people, which will be an increase of over 50% from the current headcount of 1.9 million.
That necessitates an investment in not just reskilling but also upskilling, especially as two-thirds of GCCs go in for lateral hiring of talent, as per an EY India GCC Pulse Survey.
Moreover, in a world defined by constant technological evolution and changing business models, companies across the globe, now more than ever, need to invest in reskilling and upskilling in order to maintain their edge in both operations and innovation.
Galloping Demand for Skills
The technical competency bar for GCC professionals has been considerably elevated due to the widespread adoption of automation, machine learning & artificial intelligence, cloud-based platforms, robotic process automation (RPA) and advanced data analytics.
GCCs now are no longer the back-office of an enterprise but rather the spearhead of enterprise-wide transformation initiatives. Which is why conventional hiring on its own is unable to keep pace with the GCCs’ talent requirements, with the added challenge of squaring off against global competitors for digital talent.
In fact, just 10% of the GCCs in the EY India GCC Pulse Survey opted for campus recruitments reflects a critical gap in skill requirements.
Both upskilling and reskilling enable GCCs to enhance the competencies of their employees that can best serve the organisation’s requirements. For instance, a finance-focused GCC can engage in upskilling accounting analysts in machine‑learning techniques to enable predictive cash‑flow modelling.
At the same time, it can reskill personnel engaged in back‑office operations in cybersecurity monitoring and incident response. This inhouse rejig and tweaking of talent comes with a dual benefit – speeding up skilled workforce readiness and reducing the cost and time associated with lateral hiring.
Fostering a Culture
GCCs have to realise that upskilling and reskilling are not one-off efforts that can exist as silos within an organisation. Humans, by their very nature, are reticent when it comes to stepping out of their comfort zones, especially when it involves their work skills.
As such, organisations need to encourage employees to embrace change, and this has to be top-down. Meaning, an organisation’s senior leadership must lead the way by participating in training programmes to set an example and then embedding the learning objectives into their performance goals.
A critical component that determines an organisation’s success is the speed at which it responds to the changing dynamics of the environment it operates in – or the agility with which it responds to change. Being slow to adapt is as dangerous as not adapting at all – both leading to existential extermination of an organisation.
For example, a GCC which has proactively trained its workforce in advanced analytics and data engineering will be able to re‑deploy talent seamlessly. Or if it has a ready pool of upskilled engineers, a GCC can readily serve the needs of an enterprise that needs cloud migration expertise.
A System of Rewards
Given the scarcity of talent for GCCs and the resultant high attrition rates, offering staff rewards goes a long way in retaining talent, especially one who has been upskilled or reskilled, as the GCC would have invested a fair amount of resources in the employee’s skill reorientation.
It’s a known fact that employees stick with an organisation when they feel a strong connect with the brand rather than just for the money. Which is why an India-based German automobile research and development centre linked its reward structure with automobile parts in order to strengthen the brand’s connect with the staff.
And who knows – if the staff stay long enough at the R&D centre, they could probably get an entire CKD version of the car. Of course, assembling that may require a certain degree of reskilling!
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