25% of Global Talent is Expected to Become Redundant in the Next 3 to 5 years

I’m a bit late on this, but I think it’s important to share. Zinnov, a top Globalization and Market expansion company, revealed last month  its newest “Talent Outlook 2013” report, where it highlights the upcoming HR trends for the next few years. Their survey revealed the fact that 2013 will stand as a year of talent reconciliation, even if new skills are constantly brought to focus. The key findings are listed here, and my thoughts are below. Some of the study’s Key findings: – Organizations are expecting about 25% of their talent share to become redundant during the next 3-5 years. At the same time, specialized assets in Mobility and User Experience are facing an increasing demand – The innovation hiring will mainly take place in the United States – Organizations will seek expansion mostly in the Tier II locations of the U.S., while China and India will only witness minor growth. Vamsee Tirukkala, the Managing Principal of Zinnov declared, based on the study, that user experience designers and data scientists will witness an extremely high demand, while the cloud computing experts and mobile application developers will only witness moderate-to-high demand. Fact is, these skills were just as nonexistent a decade ago. Also according to this survey, organizations are seeking people talented in the following areas: Engineering (50%), Analytics (40%) and Mobility development (32%). Organizations are expected to focus their efforts mostly in the skill set assessment and niche hiring, with 50% of respondents declaring that these would be the main point areas for HR in 2013. And while the statistical teams inside the HR departments are the ones which operate most of the large volume data and skill assessment duties, more than half of the organizations don’t have the necessary resources for it and only 20% of them are focused on this area for 2013. While I think that clearly the technology revolution and globalization are making traditional labor needs, particularly in the fields of manufacturing and retail severely lower, I think that what is most interesting to me is how organizations (which survive) will react.  While the study notes that this year will be one filled with “skill set assessment and niche hiring”, which implies that more less relevant rules will be slowly eliminated, I think training also will play a key role.   A good L&D department, in addition assessing skills, can have a significant impact on developing and adapting skills in workers toward business objectives. Despite the slow economic recovery, we may actually see in the coming years an increase in in-house skills development via training programs, in order to enable companies to evolve, while still retaining their favored employees whose talents have previously been proven.   It will be interesting to see how things develop, but this study I think is a reality check.   Thoughts?