FEATURE: ANALYTICS
insight makes it difficult to identify the most
in-demand skills versus the most costly ones,
and to prioritise and plan targeted upskilling
programmes to replace expats with local
workers over time.
The skills gap is not evenly distributed across
the economy. It’s very difficult for private
companies to compete with government
bodies and public sector organisations for
local workers when it comes to salaries and
benefits. For this reason, Saudi Arabia is
considering a generous minimum wage of
SAR5,300 for nationals entering the private
sector. Every company we speak to asks
how they should start off on the journey of
upskilling local workers. Starting with the cost
of people and work is a good first step, but
this needs to move on to a discussion around
the value of work in terms of contribution
to the company’s profitability. This requires
good data, so it’s essential to prepare and
clean your data before you start. Without
this, everything is guesswork.
Once you have an accurate view of the most
valuable work being done, you can break it
down into skillsets and associated roles. You
can then compare this against skills available
among local workers to identify the gaps and
use this information to develop and prioritise
upskilling programmes for different sections
of the workforce.
We’ve found that companies tend to focus
on people, rather than the work they do,
when planning organisational changes,
and they have little visibility of where costs
reside. This is compounded by the fact that
most run decentralised systems, so there’s
no common dataset.
Building up a view of the company’s
structure requires more than an org chart,
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workforce and then model different
scenarios to understand the work and skills
you actually need.
A change of mindset to thinking about skills,
work and activities rather than hierarchy and
job titles is fundamental to any upskilling
programme. But without advanced analytics
and strategic workforce planning, it will be
difficult to know which skills companies need
to promote among local workers.
Transferring skills and
reducing dependence is
not a zero-sum game
In the short term, upskilling is about reducing
workforce dependencies that lead to higher
costs through fines and visas by training
local workers to take up more skilled roles.
In the next decade, many young nationals
are likely to enter the workforce through
graduate programmes and fast-track
schemes. Over time, this will change
the demographic, reducing the need for
upskilling in years to come.
There’s also the changing nature of work to
think about. The World Economic Forum’s
Future of Jobs report found that, by 2020,
21% of core skills in Gulf Cooperation
Council countries will be different to skills
needed in 2015. Then there’s automation.
Across the region around 47% of all jobs are
open to automation, so many jobs are likely
to see major changes to their skills profile.
In summary, this is not a binary situation but
a multi-layered one. We can’t discount the
fact that migrant workers have a widespread
influence in the Middle East, so any upskilling
effort needs to be gradual. Companies
should not focus on upskilling based solely
ACROSS THE REGION AROUND 47% OF
ALL JOBS ARE OPEN TO AUTOMATION.
so if you’re serious about organisation
design, using presentation or diagram
software is not enough. You need to
be able to dynamically visualise your
42
INTELLIGENTCIO
on today’s skills gap but begin to plan for
and build competencies and assemble the
skills they need to take advantage of future
economic opportunities. n
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