Entrepreneurs who hire skills and not experience, qualifications

As companies adapt to a post-pandemic future, people’s ability to demonstrate key skills could become more important than their previous experience or job titles.

According to the new ideas of the thought leaders of Microsoft and LinkedIn, who claim that the rapid transformation of companies under the pandemic has changed the way companies hire and advance their staff.

“Skills will be the new currency of the post-pandemic world,” Ahmed Mazhari, president of Microsoft Asia and corporate vice president, told CNBC Make It.

Coronavirus-induced blockages forced employers to move quickly by 2020, implementing new technologies and flexible ways of working. As a result, “five years of acceleration passed in one year,” said Olivier Legrand, general manager and vice president of LinkedIn for Asia-Pacific and China.

Now, jobs will want to show that employees can keep pace with change.

In fact, it is already happening.

According to LinkedIn, more than three-quarters (77%) of jobs posted on its platform in Asia-Pacific this year focused on advanced skills in industry experience and job-specific titles. Meanwhile, people have been doubling self-development and spent 43 million hours on LinkedIn Learning in 2020 alone.

“The narrative around lifelong learning has been around for a while,” Legrand said. “But I think the impact of the pandemic on jobs moved her from a “beautiful” to a “must have”.

This is due to the need for new skills (also known as skills gap) and the cross-cutting nature of industries and jobs.

“All companies have to think about their own version of digitization, and that requires a new set of skills,” Legrand said.

These include technology-related competencies such as machine learning, software development, digital marketing, and data analytics. Non-technical skills such as leadership, project management and communication are also increasingly important, he added.

This change could accelerate innovation and, consequently, economic growth, especially in Asia, Microsoft’s Mazhari said.

“Spending on technology as a percentage of GDP (gross domestic product) will double in the next decade from 5% to 10% globally,” Mazhari said. “We will see a bigger share of the acceleration (in Asia) … because our growth rates are higher.”

The International Data Corporation has predicted this global information and communications technology spending will grow by at least 5% annually from 2021 to 2023 as companies and countries catch up after the pandemic.

Over the next five to ten years, new technologies, such as robotics, artificial intelligence and artificial and virtual reality, will account for 25 percent of that spending, the market research firm added.

“Many countries will skip a lot of industrialization series and technological progress, ”said Mazhari, who described Asia as a mosaic of technological maturity, with China at one end and Cambodia at the other.

“In this leap, the need for more skills will be even more significant than the current one.”

The big continent of 4.3 billion people also has young people by its side, Mazhari said, noting that the young workforce can adapt quickly to new technologies.

Some of the youngest people in the world live in Asia. In 2020, the average age of India’s population was 28.7 years, while that of Malaysia was 29.2 and that of Indonesia 31.1, according to the Central Intelligence Agency. license. This compares with 38.5 in the United States and 40.6 in the United Kingdom

As such, educational institutions should start equipping students for a competency-focused future, he said.

“There’s enough knowledge to have between Bing and Google,” he said in reference to Internet search engines. “What you can’t get are skills.”

“Skill infusion would be the most critical change that education systems need to make and that governments need to implement in a very meaningful way.”

To help with this transition, last year Microsoft and LinkedIn pledged to equip 25 million people with new digital skills through free online courses from Microsoft Learn, LinkedIn Learning, and GitHub Learning Lab.

To date, it has helped 30 million people in 249 countries, nearly six million of them in Asia, according to Microsoft.

Companies now plan to help 250,000 companies hire for skills by 2021 using new tools like LinkedIn Skills Path, which allows employers to select candidates based on their skills.

LinkedIn’s Legrand said these applied assessments could reduce subjectivity among hiring managers and improve diversity and inclusion.

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