What are the HR Skills of the Future ?

The Human Resources profession needs to change. It must become more digital and analytical to deliver greater business value. The digital age has brought with it sweeping changes to the way employees and workers interact with each other, the way work itself gets done and the amount of workplace data that when analyzed properly can create tremendous amount of value for organizations.

As a consequence, there is an increasing need for HR professionals to become digitally and numerically literate - to acquire the skills necessary to process, produce and leverage digital information. When HR professionals, as core Business Partners, are analytically and digitally more literate, they will possess skills that will put their organization in the best possible position to deliver greater value to all stakeholders.

But what do HR professionals themselves want to learn?

This question is the one that we, at myHRfuture, studied via our crowd-sourced survey in late 2018. We wanted to do something different. We did not want to go to a select group of companies. We did not want to pre-select a number of people beforehand or gather data via selective focus groups. We wanted to generate data from people across the world and ask them what skills they thought were most important to learn for 2019 and how they wanted to learn. Within four weeks we had engaged people from over 60 countries.

Skills of the Future

Of our survey respondents, 72% of them stated they had roles in Human Resources internally in their organizations. A further 23% worked in areas that support HR - either as a consultant or working as HR vendors. When asked a "free text" question we found these insights:

• Expertise in People Analytics is the most in-demand skill. People want to become more analytical and data-driven.
• Managing stakeholders and influencing others are key skills for HR professionals. There is a clear indication that being effective in these two skills is very important to be a successful HR professional in 2019.
• Learning about new HR technologies and using techniques like Design Thinking to drive adoption are also areas that are key for Human Resources professionals

The Future of Learning

We asked respondents about the methods they use for learning and the amount of time they spend using them every month. We asked them about blogs, free online training and formal online company training, amongst other things. Our hypothesis was that people don't learn from training provided to them by their company as much as they do from other sources. In summary we found the following:

In summary, people want to learn their professionals skills using platforms and sources outside their company. This tells us that company developed training is not having the effect needed in the modern world. Also it seems clear that many organizations are not doing enough to provide HR professionals with access to the type of content that they need to develop the skills necessary for the future.

The percentage of survey responses when asked "How much time do you spend with the following learning formats?"

Jonathan Ferrar, is the CEO and co-founder of Insight222 and is one of the authors of the HR Skills of the Future Report along with Ian Bailie and David Green.

The article originally appeared on https://www.myhrfuture.com