Manufacturing is in a global recovery phase but faces many more challenges than past expansions. The most pressing issue is the scarcity of talent.
In developed countries, the workforce is aging, and fewer young workers opt for a career in manufacturing. The economic downturn at the end of last decade created a perception of instability in production, and new graduates are looking for more glamorous jobs.
In the United States, a 50-year cultural drumbeat created the perception that a college degree is the only ticket to a career. Fortunately, we now see the seeds of disillusionment and the specter of crushing college debt driving savvy young people toward alternatives.
In developing countries, education is struggling to equip its young people for skilled careers. Even in formerly rapidly expanding economies, the education deficit is creating an alarming growth in unemployment. India faces a massive brain drain as skilled technology workers migrate to the United States, Europe, and Australia, while at the same time, failing education is not creating a new generation of skilled labor.[1]
Global talent management has grown up since the days of cheap foreign labor and expatriate management. While 25 years ago our emphasis in HR was on finding ways to deal with the high failure rate of expats, the trend today is toward “glocalization,” a blend of unified global management and local control.
That way of thinking requires the development of both global and local leaders, with the emphasis on local leaders who can think globally.
Researchers at Sierra-Cedar found that the most successful model for both centralized efficiency and global innovation to be what they call a Transnational approach. Transnational management relies on the efficiencies of centralized management rolled out to local markets while at the same time maintaining local flexibility and sharing innovations worldwide.[2]
At the center of this approach is global human capital management technology. Industry leaders like Oracle, SuccessFactors, and Workday provide standardized processes and service delivery models localized in dozens of languages. These products also provide segmentation and security management profiles that allow local and regional managers to deal with their unique needs.
One of the challenges in developing global leaders has been the inability for global companies to get a complete picture of global talent. Developing global leaders is hampered by the necessity of ending employment in one local or regional system and hiring the employee in another disconnected system. It makes tracking employee development costly and talent analysis nearly impossible.
With unified global systems and regional or local control, talent managers are now able to get a complete picture of talent all over the world. They can use unified analytics to make better decisions faster and balance resource allocations. And, with the support of unified talent management, companies can develop truly global leaders who assimilate well into new environments while maintaining a global mindset.
If your HR systems limit your global possibilities, we recommend taking a hard look at the global cloud deployment model. Enjoy the benefits of global standardization and local innovation.
References:
1. Chanda, Nayan. “India’s Education Deficit.” BusinessWorld. May 26, 2016.
2. “Global Human Capital Management Best Practices.” Sierra-Cedar. 2015.
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