An organization's workforce is its greatest asset. This is not a cliche but a well-established fact. Companies that invest in people deliver higher quality service to clients, are more profitable and are better at tackling long term challenges.
The skills landscape is constantly shifting. New technologies emerge at a faster rate than we’ve ever experienced. Businesses models utilizing these technologies shift just as fast. If a company isn’t the first to capitalize on these shifts, their competitors will.
The future of skilling will be all about creating professionals who not only have core technical skills, but also have skills that make them well-rounded professionals. This includes skills in industry domain, architecture, business knowledge, and soft skills (critical thinking, creativity, flexibility, problem-solving and emotional intelligence). We have seen skill structures move from I-shaped (one core skill specialization) to T-shaped to what is now defined as a comb or m-shaped skill structure (multiple skills).
While the type of skills required is changing, what is also changing is the pedagogy:
- Most employees need training that is available on-demand, anytime anywhere any device.
- Every employee has their own areas of strength and weakness; therefore, they need training that is customized to their specific needs rather than painting everybody with the same brush and conducting same trainings for everybody.
- Education also requires direct experience or on-the-job training that helps individuals hone what they learned through practical application of skills and concepts.
Beyond building and guiding a career path for their employees through these trainings, companies are finding efficient ways to utilize these skills in the 'right' projects to maximize revenue and profits through deployable and ready workforce.
Clients are looking at ways to reduce overhead from having to extensively interview and evaluate candidates from their supplier.
Virtusa's Engineering IQ program is designed to solve for these current day challenges that employees, service companies and their clients face. The Engineering IQ program provides a solution that not only meets but also exceeds employee skilling aspirations. It provides an efficient business model to serve clients’ skill needs and help clients by reducing overhead for candidate selection while also increasing the quality and fit of candidates.
The key characteristics of the Engineering IQ program are:
- Objectivity - Every Virtusa employee is given a single score (called Capability Index) that indicates their capability based on technical skills, engineering skills, specialized skills soft skills, total experience, etc.
- Targeted Learning Experiences - Based on the gaps identified, we provide targeted training modules for expedited competency achievement that use best-of-breed training channels both online and offline.
- Data-driven decisions – We don’t just track, but we also leverage scores for project deployment, career progression, and upskilling needs. The data also helps us make deliberate decisions to better configure project teams by basing team composition on respective proficiency scores rather than just the experience or seniority of employees.
- Reduced overheads for clients - Change the existing “selection process” that clients use with a process that reduces or even eliminates time spent on interviews and decisions regarding candidates.
As business trends towards requiring well-rounded professionals that have specific skillsets, it’s important now more than ever for organizations to invest in their people and guide their career progression and competency development. With Engineering IQ, a comprehensive program that brings employee training to the forefront of our success, we’re able to help our clients with disciplined, motivated resources that can be quickly onboarded to tackle their toughest business and technology challenges.