Managing Talent: Finding, Retaining, Upskilling, and Reskilling - with Abhimanyu Saxena, Co-Founder of Scaler

CIO Exchange Podcast

While it is not a new issue, managing talent continues to be an important challenge for technology leaders. Abhimanyu Saxena is the Co-Founder of Scaler, an online transformative upskilling platform for working tech professionals. In this episode, Abhimanyu and Yadin dive into retaining, upskilling and reskilling talent, discussing best practices that will help both employers and employees navigate this changing landscape.
They touch on everything from standard approaches, to the major shifts in the marketplace and talent requirements presented by emerging AI technology.

Key Quotes:

“For a software engineering professional or a data scientist, most important is learning to learn. That is much more important than what is the framework or technology that you might know today, because whatever you know is going to get outdated in few years.”

“The most important part of any upskilling effort is that, is this active learning versus passive learning? Generally, passive learning doesn't lead to much of an impact.”

“Generally, the best performers, the most impactful employees of the company, are the people who have seen all the facades, all the faces of the product. And now they have that intuition [about] what really adds value to your customers.”

“Generative AI, ChatGPT, is exceptionally powerful. But, despite that, there will be a time where it hits it's limit and then you have to resort back to human intuition and problem solving and move ahead. So you cannot be totally reliant on that. It's very similar to how a calculator is a powerful tool for a mathematician, but a mathematician's intellect is not in a calculator. That stays with the mathematician."

Time stamps:

(01:00) Thoughts on the need for IT talent

(02:49) What employers look for in employees

(04:25) The importance of employing problem-solvers

(07:50) Examples of how that looks in organizations

(11:51) Ways to approach upskilling and reskilling

(13:35) The benefits of retaining and moving talent

(20:47) How Scaler upskills and reskills

(22:56) The issues with a one-size fits all approach

(26:15) How has Scaler’s approach evolved?

(28:37) How are technology leaders are talking about generative AI?

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Links:

Abhimanyu Saxena on LinkedIn

CIO Exchange on Twitter

Yadin Porter de León on Twitter
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