What are the Top 10 Trends Impacting the Future of HR?
In this article, we’re going to explore the application of talent market analytics to HR. Working with HRForecast, we’ve analysed a plethora of macroeconomic data to reveal insights about the future of HR, including which skills are important, what the key trends impacting HR are, and how the pandemic has impacted the requirements for HR professionals. We’ll take a look at:
The top ten trends impacting HR roles and skills
How these trends have evolved over the last 18 months
How different industries are hiring against emerging roles and skills
How HR can prepare for a digital, data-driven future
But before we dive in, let’s take a closer look at why organisations should build a skills-based view of the workforce, what a skills-based view is, and how talent market analytics can help.
The pace of change facing organisations today mean that job roles and job descriptions very quickly become outdated. Research from Gartner has found that 40% of employees are frequently completing tasks outside their job description. This finding suggests that roles are ill-designed to capture the skills required for today’s workflows.
Adopting a skills-based view of the workforce
Instead of depending solely on job descriptions, a skills-based view of the workforce allows organisations to maintain a more nimble, agile view of the workforce. Thanks to the accelerating maturity of AI, machine learning and big data, it is much easier to keep tabs on skills. These technologies can be used to pull together all the employee skills data at your organisation’s disposal – both internal and external – into one place. The aim here is to build a skills taxonomy.
This type of view provides business leaders with visibility into new and emerging skills, which then allow organisations to respond quickly and effectively when skill needs change.
The challenge is, currently skills data is often spread inside and outside an organisation, making it difficult to have one single view of skills in your company. Research from Degreed, for example, shows that the most up-to-date skillset of any individual can exist in multiple locations at one time, only one of which is the internal HR system.
Enter: Talent Market Analytics
Talent market analytics is on hand to support organisations to make sense of the wealth of dispersed data on skills. Talent market analytics solutions can provide access to a variety of data sources, including:
Source: Insight222, Building the Future Organisation: A New Playbook for Workforce Planning
These solutions have been gaining popularity and are now widely used by HR teams, especially in People Analytics. Insight222 Research reveals that 67% of companies surveyed use external talent market analytics solutions to support their recruitment or workforce planning efforts. 55% of those companies are using more than one talent market analytics technology for data collection.
A great example of talent market analytics in use comes from Philips. The Talent Intelligence team at Philips currently uses external talent data to answer several questions, such as:
1. Location Feasibility
a. What is the skill availability at specific locations?
b. Which locations are more attractive to live in, and can they attract talent?
2. Competitor Insights
a. Who are the competitors in these locations?
b. Are they also looking for a similar type of role?
3. Talent Insights/ Availability
a. Which areas provide the best universities for talent?
4. Future Skills/ Competencies Forecasting
a. What are the emerging skills in the marketplace that we will need to build or buy?
5. Salary benchmarking
a. What is the average compensation cost for roles at different locations?
b. What kind of compensation and benefits are our competitors offering?
Applying talent market analytics to HR
Now that we’ve covered a skills-based view of the workforce and the application of talent market analytics to support this effort, let’s turn to the insights gained from HRForecast’s talent analytics solution to understand more about the future of HR.
With a focus on the field of Human Resources, HRForecast analysed around 643,000 jobs and over 6,900 skills both pre-Covid (Jan 2019 – Feb 2020) and ongoing during-Covid (March 2020 – April 2021) across multiple industries, including professional services, retail & FMCG, Technology, Financial Services and more. At a high-level, the process is as follows:
What are the top ten trends impacting HR roles and skills?
Based on HRForecast’s analysis, the top ten trends impacting the Human Resources field are as follows:
To find out how these trends have evolved over the last 18 months throughout the pandemic and explore the emerging skills and roles in HR, as well as how to prepare for them.
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