Talent Mobility in HyperLoop

Earlier this month, news reports mentioned how India could have a hyperloop in 38 months which could enable travelling between cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai and others a matter of minutes and not hours. According to a Bloomberg report, Hyperloop One’s CEO Rob Lloyd said the company is in early talks with the Indian government on the how to make some of these proposals come true, including sourcing materials locally.

Here, we are looking at the impact of technology evolution on talent mobility. For the purpose of this news analysis, talent mobility is defined as ability of pockets of talents, located geographically to move into different roles and the role technology plays in assisting such movement. Before we try to understand the implications of this technology on talent mobility specifically from India perspective, let’s spend a few minutes in understanding the concept of Hyper loop. 

Hyperloop was first proposed by the iconic CEO of SapceX, Elon Musk in a white paper in 2013, as a replacement to the California high speed rail. It involves sending magnetically levitated pods through low-pressure tubes at very high speeds, carrying goods or people. Hyperloop One is currently carrying out feasibility studies for a hyperloop rail system in Abu Dhabi, which could lead to the company building its first such system between the UAE capital and the city of Al Ain – a distance comparable to that between Mumbai and Pune.

So if such transport system was made available it has the possibility of altering patterns of talent mobility. It would allow people to choose to stay in their home towns while working in larger cities or city centres.

Not long ago, with the discovery and popularization of internet technology, talent mobility moved globally by allowing companies to shift work to low cost locations across borders, thus accessing and developing talent in a completely different market inaccessible earlier. The hyper loop technology will do this more at a local level by allowing companies to move certain operations to Tier2 and Tier 3 cities. This would need significant investment by government in developing this transportation model, while it would need corporations to invest in building the talent capabilities in geographical pockets currently unexplored or under developed. 

With the advent of SMAC, many organizations and jobs within them are moving to a “work from home” nature. This allows individuals and companies explore talent mobility a lot differently than just geographically. The aspect of moving to a different city and country for job is not so out of fashion even today and may not go out of fashion completely. This technology however has a potential to add an interesting dimension to the talent mobility equation which companies would have to consider. 

We also see a rise in political pressure to keep talent mobility low or local, both within India and even in USA. Those political forces will have some temporary impact on talent mobility but increasing technological innovations will play an important and critical role in deciding and evolving such solutions and options. 

This is clearly one of the greatest transportation engineering innovations which have the potential to impact human lives. If one looks at the history of metro trains, London tube opened for passengers in 1863 and we are now using an advanced version of that technology in India, almost 150 years later. We believe adoption of this new technology from an Indian perspective would be much faster than that, while we believe that it’s still very early days for one to completely understand the impacts of such mode of transportation available on business and personal lives of individuals. Nevertheless, this does present an exciting new way of commuting for work and I am sure more and more governments would look to establish such pilot projects in the next 3 to 5 years.