Article: HR trends in the automobile industry in India

Strategic HR

HR trends in the automobile industry in India

The future of HR is promising in the next decade, but only for the one who seeks to develop a career in designing future talent strategies for technologies which are still in innovation labs.
HR trends in the automobile industry in India

The Indian consumer pattern is shifting dramatically over the last few decades owing to a variety of reasons.  Primary contributor is the way the Indian economy has had paradigm shift post liberalization. The new Indian Urban class has embraced owning cars as a necessity to what it was once upon a time as social status.  We find that with a 7.7 percent Q4 GDP growth, India is the world’s fastest-growing major economy. Car sales are at 19.6 percent in May 2018. The International Energy Agency has projected a 7.75 percent growth in car ownership by 2040, projecting that compared to 20 people in a 1000 owning cars in India today, the figure will rise to 175 in 22 years. 

War for talent 2.0

Talent sourcing has, for over a decade, been one of the most daunting challenges for the HR Organization in the auto sector. Despite employing over 19 million people, its real problem is a skill gap, which the industry has been extensive to meet the growing demand.  Simultaneously, ‘talent churn,’ despite the entrance of new players over the past two decades, remains limited. The gap between what the industry needs to what the Indian University prepares them in campus remains as wide as it was in the past. This poses key strategic thinking on the HR organization to be innovative on the talent strategies to be adopted at the workplace. Despite these challenges, the industry urgently needs a breed of employees and workers capable of taking the initiative, demonstrating bold new thinking and original product development in an age of aggressive analog-to-digital transition.

With automation and the industry radically shrinking the factory value chain, hiring for the auto industry will need to bridge the technology talent gap by sourcing fresh talent from campuses. The sector is likely to hire over lakh engineers by 2020, to meet the demand for new tech-based skills that are fast arising. These skills, which are currently at a deficit in the industry, include social intelligence, computational thinking, artificial intelligence, virtual collaboration, automotive design, computational thinking. 

The industry’s digitization is also forcing it to become leaner, and more prepared to serve as a battleground for a gap that exists between early comers and new entrants, instead of the cemented dominance of established leaders. Therefore, new hiring policies will have to increasingly focus on fresh blood to tap new market opportunities, while staying competitive in areas like customer service and overall value creation. 

The industry’s current talent pool will need to be reskilled and upskilled away from the tried-and-tested methods and technologies. In line with global competencies, silos will need to be broken to forge a workforce that can rapidly collaborate in today’s increasingly unpredictable business climate. To ensure that these changes stay in alignment with career aspirations and don’t trigger attrition, employees will need to be provided with multi-layered functional career forums for dialogue, and opportunities for intra-organisational career mobility. 

Strategies for HR to follow

  1. Talent differentiation: An integral part of the strategy has to be its exclusivity in managing talent. At Alliance, we segment the talent groups across all the entities of our operations. The combination of scientific techniques deployed in talent assessments along with the robustness by a form of cross-entity leadership validation is a real booster in creating a sustainable competitive advantage. 

  2. Holistic Talent Development: Secondly, we have an array of tailor-made development interventions acting as our true differentiator. We have an effective learning framework which gets our talent not just to learn but also to develop by a form of doing, from others and through on the go training. 

  3. Agile Talent deployment: Thirdly, yet another effective element of our strategy is its quotient to forecast and understand the talent demands in an uncertain future environment. The Alliance succession planning model is aligned, authentic and agile as it is built as a joint exercise in partnership with our business leaders at a collective forum. 

  4. Mobility for all: Constructive disruption is not only prevalent in our business model so does it amplify our talent Mobility practices. Presence of multi-layered functional career forums across entities and the Alliance helps us develop a meticulous understanding of the career needs of people. 

No more business-as-usual for HR

Human Resources cannot be immune to the digital transformation of the workforce as it will be beyond just applying tools for efficiency. A large number of administrative functions will have to be automated by bringing in BOTs in HR and let the HR business partners prioritize more strategic issues. HR leaders can reap the benefits of enterprise-wide investment in automation and digitization to focus on enhancing employee experience.

The future of HR is promising in the next decade, but only for the one who seeks to develop a career in designing future talent strategies for technologies which are still in innovation labs.    

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Topics: Strategic HR

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