Episode 16 | The Future of Tech Talent 

As the tech industry evolves so does the talent within it. On Episode 16 of The Disruptive Mindset Podcast I had the opportunity to talk to Jaya Satish, the Senior Vice President & HR Head of Europe in Mphasis, about what the future of tech talent could look like. Here are her insights:

What do you think is coming next for tech talent?

We need more thinkers. As artificial intelligence starts to take care of the bulk of IT work, talent are going to start being more innovative. What the Industrial Revolution did to people 100 years ago is what AI is going to do now, but on a different level. The Industrial Revolution didn’t stop all of the jobs, it just pushed mankind to a different level. AI has launched so now you have to push yourself to a different level too. When it comes to what human beings are expected to do, we need to start moving towards demo thinking or value creation, because routine tasks can be automated now.

How will AI impact talent over the next five years?

If you take whatever is happening today and give it another five to seven years, we’ll see a lot of development. There’s a lot of speculation going on in terms of what will happen to tech talent, but within the IT industry people have started to realise that the talent you need is of a different level. People are resizing, and business orientation is becoming a very big factor because that domain experience is highly valuable. In fact, prompt engineering is becoming a vital skill. People, universities and corporations are trying to see what the future of technology will be so that they can train up talent in those areas. People are still thinking about prompt engineering as a big field because of how you aid AI, and how valuable that is to businesses. 

Domain centric work like regular coding will be slowing down, because Chat GPT and other artificial intelligence will take a lot of that work on. There will be new stuff coming in which we can’t necessarily predict five years down the line. 10 years ago, all everybody was talking about was the cloud, but nobody could put a handle on it and say what it would be. Now everybody trusts the cloud. People are talking about AI now, but we’ll have to wait and see which skills will come up and bring a higher level of value.

Where will we see companies investing in tech?

A lot of companies are putting money into generative AI and machine learning because they see it taking up a large part of the market, but there’ll be more than that on the skill side. Companies should invest in keeping your people motivated when you are not connected to them in the traditional way. Social media is probably ruling the way you connect now, but how do corporations use informal platforms like social media platforms to connect with people? Not all corporations would use something like WhatsApp or Instagram to get in touch with people. That’s something I’m waiting to see, especially when the crowd is very young. So yes, we have some open questions, and I do not have all the answers to them. But the beauty of it is that we at least know the problems we’ll be facing. 

To learn more about Jaya’s work and the future of tech talent, tune into Episode 16 of The Disruptive Mindset Podcast here.