Oracle seminar: Advice for building the future ready workforce

In the age of disruption, jobs should be reinvented rather than eliminated as human talent and expertise are still required.
By: | September 19, 2019
Topics: Asia-Pacific | Compliance | DE&I | Digital Transformation | Employee Experience | News | Professional Development | Singapore | Talent Management

Companies are moving beyond their mission statements and retaining talent through the reinvention of jobs, in a bid to resolving their ongoing talent crunch dilemmas. This was one of the key messages from Oracle’s Future Ready Workforce breakfast seminar, held in Singapore on September 18.

Keynote speaker Adrian Ole (pictured) told the select audience of HR leaders that this reinvention required organisations to adapt to the changing world economy, through restructuring jobs and working cultures, and building collaborative workplaces. As Executive Director of Deloitte’s Human Capital Practice in Singapore,  he was also able to share some key insights from the group’s Global Human Capital Trends report for 2019.

Chief among these was the fact that workers themselves are forcing the reinvention of job roles, as they embrace the gig economy and freelance principles. “The alternative workforce is now mainstream,” he said. “In Southeast Asia, 46% of workers are self-employed and only 11% of respondents (to the report’s research) had established processes to manage and develop an alternative workforce,” he said.

Updates from OpenWorld

The Future-Ready Workforce seminar coincided with Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco this week. In the latest updates to its world-leading HCM Cloud package, workflows have been further automated to help HR professionals save time by simplifying and streamlining tasks. The updates include:

  • Event-Based Processes: New features automate multi-step processes for event-based tasks. The system simplifies the process for employees by aggregating all necessary steps and automating mundane tasks.
  • HCM Experience Design Studio: Updates help HR teams quickly and easily design comprehensive business processes and workflows, as well as create customer-defined defaulting and validation logic. 
  • Intuitive Self-Service for complex, industry-specific workflows: New self-service capabilities improve ease-of-use for position management. This is particularly beneficial for position-run organisations in higher education, healthcare, and public sector industries where HR needs to set up automatic rules and position progressions when managing headcount.

For more information, click here.

This, in turn, is forcing organisations to re-look at the ways they offer learning and development, with many evolving from building content internally to becoming “curators” of content that facilitate an employee-led learning culture across their workforce.

“Reinventing the way people learn is very important,” he said. “It’s the number one trend for 2019.”

Ole also took part in a panel discussion alongside two practicing HR leaders, where the real-world application of HR transformation was the focus.

Juliana Ang, Chief HR Officer of NTUC Income, and Siu Ming Hong, Senior Vice President and Head of HR, for Great Eastern Life, both shared some insights into their very different transformation journeys, the challenges, and solutions they have enacted.

Rowan Tonkin, the Melbourne-based Senior Director of HR Transformation with Oracle in Asia-Pacific (including Japan), hosted the event, which was organised by HRM Asia.