Present-day HR professionals need a range of new skills to equip them for now and into the future.
By Jaen Beelders, director and head of analytics business stream at 21st Century, and Elmen Lamprecht, consultant at 21st Century
Human resources and the Future of Work
The Future of Work will place an extraordinary demand on HR professionals to lead their organisations strategically through this disruptive period. However, before they can lead the change, they themselves must change and adapt. This will require HR Departments to identify the trends of 4IR that will have the most significant impact on the industry. They will have to evolve their functions to serve all stakeholders better, while moulding and transforming roles and responsibilities to adapt to a new reality.
With changing times and demand, HR professionals now need a new set of skills and competencies to be an excellent contributor to the business.
The following table presents the skills required in order to capacitate HR staff to comfortably manage their HR analytics reporting:
| Digital Literacy |
- Training regarding the basic understanding of systems, data, artificial intelligence, and people analytics.
- Regular retraining on systems used. We recommend quick monthly training sessions (1 hour) hosted by the System Super User with one annual full system update arranged by the supplier (this can be done over video conferencing to save costs).
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| Data Literacy |
- Training regarding exporting and importing data from any system that they currently use.
- Intermediate to advanced excel training for HR to do their own data analytics and reporting. Graphical representation of data is vital.
- For those individuals who need to work with data from multiple sources, training on extracting data from the database and on creating reports directly from the Data Warehouse using PowerBI/SSRS
- For those individuals who need to provide reports, training on PowerPoint is essential.
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| Reporting and Presentation Skills |
- Report writing
- Proposal writing
- Advanced PowerPoint
- Presentation and facilitation skills – presenting a report or proposal to a group of people
- Managing online meetings
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| Commercial skills |
- Understanding business strategy
- Business ethics
- Situational ethics
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| Critical thinking |
- Creative problem solving
- Design Thinking
|
| Branding and User Experience |
- Basic principles of brand management
- Content writing for marketing/advertising
- Principles of Customer/Employee Experience
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