Search results

Studies show that the twenty-first-century construction industry needs reskilling and upskilling tools to train large numbers of the workforce for better-integrated project delivery. Evidence shows that digitisation via the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technology can play a critical role in reskilling and competency demand. Attempting to use digital technology may have had some challenges. Studies about the perceived hindrances facing Nigeria's built environment professionals (BEP) reskilling and upskilling needs in the workplace via 4IR technologies are scarce. Thus, the study investigated the perceived encumbrances facing Nigeria's BEP training needs and proffered measures to improve their performance in the workplace via 4IR technologies.

The researchers engaged BEP in Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria. Regarding the data collection, a qualitative research design was adopted. The study achieved saturation after 32 virtual interviews. A thematic analysis was adopted for the collected data.

The study shows that using 4IR for reskilling and upskilling will enhance integrated project delivery. But the level of usage in training needs is low. Findings identified the various ways reskilling and upskilling could be achieved. Also identified are the major built environment areas that require 4IR training. Findings highlighted possible encumbrances facing the use of 4IR technologies by Nigerian BEP for reskilling and upskilling needs in the workplace and proffered feasible measures to improve 4IR usage for training needs.

The study is restricted to the perceived encumbrances and proffers measures to improve BEP reskilling and upskilling needs via 4IR technologies via a qualitative method. Future research is required to validate the findings and test the proposed framework that emerged from the study.

The study confirms that reskilling and upskilling measures are required at all skill levels and may lead to economic growth. The paper would advance Nigerian higher educational accreditation agencies and various BEP regulatory bodies to review the curriculum and incorporate 4IR as a component or module.

The thematic network analysis and proposed framework could be utilised to stimulate Nigeria's BEP reskilling and upskilling needs in the workplace via 4IR technologies. It would stir main stakeholders, especially government policymakers, to facilitate programmes to improve 4IR technologies usage.

Introduction: Artificial intelligence (AI) has progressed significantly over the past few years, evolving into a collection of innovative tools that provide a competitive advantage to businesses. The acceptance and investment in AI are skyrocketing over the globe. The entry of AI in the workplace automates tasks and impacts making a timely decisions. At the same time, the workforce is not ready to welcome the new technology due to the skill gap. The organisation has to face many challenges in reskilling and convincing the workforce to incorporate AI in their work.

Purpose: With this study, the authors aim to analyse and highlight the introduction of AI in the organisation and the call for the reskilling of the workforce. To figure out what skills are most important for employees to learn to advance their careers.

Methodology: Given the deductive nature of the study, the researchers used secondary data collected and compiled from research papers, publications, websites, HR blogs, survey reports, etc. Research papers from reputed journals, reports of consultancies and agencies have been considered to synthesise the information and present it in a systematic manner and to derive the conclusion.

Findings: The findings indicate AI’s capabilities and applications have grown considerably, which shows the importance of AI in a growing number of fields, yet several hurdles need to be overcome, the most prominent one being the issues concerning upskilling the workforce for the future of AI. This study reveals the change in the perceived importance of the skills in the present and future times. Reskilling and upskilling the workforce and creating new talent to meet the changing employment demands is becoming increasingly important.

In this paper I begin to answer the neglected question of “When to downsize?” Specifically, is downsizing and the associated reskilling of workforces an appropriate response to technological discontinuity? Based on past organizational literature written about technological discontinuity, downsizing, and reskilling, I develop a theoretical framework that indicates when downsizing following a technological discontinuity will increase organizational effectiveness. Propositions are developed based on this framework. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for managers and future researchers.

This research explores the link between job redesign and skilling in three Lebanese service provider industries, aiming to understand how these factors affect organizational agility, a crucial factor for efficiency and effectiveness and promote long-term interventions through job redesign, upskilling and reskilling.

This study employed two surveys, one for personnel (employees) and one for human aid managers (HR managers). These surveys collected data from 384 employees and 67 HR managers. The study utilized a work design questionnaire (WDQ), skilling application evaluation and the change acceptance model and testing to evaluate job redesign, skilling application effectiveness, technology acceptance and change readiness.

It was revealed that there is a significant and positive relationship between job redesign and the application of skilling programs. This relationship was shown to enhance organizational agility, with a particular focus on employees' technology acceptance and readiness for change. The integrated framework that combines job redesign, upskilling and reskilling was empirically tested and found to enable organizations to build their agility. The study also identified challenges and offered solutions for implementation, emphasizing the importance of employee responsiveness.

This research emphasizes the need for organizations to adapt job designs and enhance employee skills to enhance organizational agility, recommending a structured approach that combines job redesign and skill development efforts.

This research integrates job redesign, upskilling and reskilling in Lebanese service provider industries, contributing to organizational change and workforce development. It emphasizes technology acceptance and readiness for change.

Introduction: Human resource management (HRM) is going through a transformation phase due to the pandemic. The COVID-19 crisis compelled the employees to work virtually. To mitigate the effects of COVID-19, several organisations heavily invested in artificial intelligence (AI) in the realm of HRM.

Purpose: With limited studies on the paradigm shift in HRM post-pandemic and the role of AI, the study investigates and proposes a conceptual framework for the paradigm shift in HRM practices post-COVID-19 pandemic and the significance of AI. Furthermore, the study investigates the outcomes of the use of AI in HRM for organisations and employees.

Methodology: A comprehensive review of the literature based on the guidelines of Tranfield, Denyer, and Smart (2003) and Crossan and Apaydin (2010) has been followed. A systematic literature review assisted in critically analysing, synthesising, and mapping the extant literature by identifying the broad themes involved.

Findings: COVID-19-related economic disruption has led to a paradigm shift in HRM practices. AI-enabled HRM practices are now centred around remote and contingent workforce management, mindfulness, social capital, increasing employee engagement, reskilling and upskilling towards new competencies, etc. AI is making remote work seamless through smooth recruitment and selection process, onboarding, career and development, tracking and managing the performance, facilitating learning, and talent management. Post-pandemic, AI-powered tools based on data mining (DM), predictive analytics, big data analytics, natural language processing (NLP), intelligent robots, machine learning (ML), virtual (VR)/augmented reality (AR), etc., have paved the way for managing the HRM practices effectively, thereby leading to enhanced organisational performance, employee well-being, automation, and reduced cost.

This paper aims to examine transferable skills and viable career transition pathways for hospitality and tourism workers. Future career prospects are discussed, along with the importance of reskilling for low-wage hospitality workers.

A network analysis is conducted to model skill relationships between the hospitality industry and other industries such as health-care and information technology. Multiple data are used in the analysis, including data from the US Department of Labor Occupational Information Network (O*NET), wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and job computerization data (Frey and Osborne, 2017).

Although hospitality workers have lower than average skills scores when compared to workers from other career clusters included in the analysis, they possess essential soft skills that are valuable in other industries. Therefore, improving hospitality workers’ existing soft skills may help them enhance their cross-sector mobility, which may allow them to obtain jobs with a lower likelihood of computerization.

The findings shed light on workforce development theories and practice in the hospitality industry by quantitatively analyzing cross-sector skill correlations. Sharpening transferable soft skills will be essential to enhancing hospitality workers’ career development opportunities.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that specifically examines the skill taxonomy for the hospitality industry and identifies its connection with other in-demand career clusters.

This chapter x-rayed the industrial revolution phases down to the 4th industrial era or the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) The Fourth Industrial Revolution — commonly referred to as Industry 4.0 or i4.0 — is the next stage in digital transformation. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is sometimes described as an incoming thunderstorm, a sweeping pattern of change visible in the distance, arriving at a pace that affords little time to prepare. With the resultant effects of up-skilling and re-skilling the workforce for future fits of the industry 4.0 era. The chapter also provided answers to what skills today's workforce need to develop as their roles evolve, what re-skilling, cross-skilling, up-skilling is all about and the various strategies through which library managers can adopt to encourage their workforce to re-skill, cross-skill and up-skill.

In the post-COVID-19 era, the hospitality industry is rapidly moving towards digitalization, which requires employees to upgrade their knowledge and skills. Some employees resist those changes and refuse to upgrade their knowledge, skills and ways of doing things. Therefore, there is a need to understand this unexplored area and so this study examines employee intentions to embrace digital technology from the perspective of upgrading their skills and knowledge. The study investigates the moderating role of the employees' resistance to change motive (RCM) on their intention to embrace digital technology, especially in the post-COVID-19 pandemic scenario.

The research is conducted using dynamic capability view (DCV) theory and status quo bias (SQB) theory. Drawing on the existing literature in this area, a theoretical model is developed, which is validated using the structural equation modelling technique to analyse data from hospitality industry employees.

The results indicate that employees' dynamic capability plays a significant role in employees' upgrading their skill and knowledge capabilities, and this significantly improves employee intention to embrace digital technology. It also finds that the employee RCM plays a significant role in the relationship between upgrading skill capability and their knowledge capability to relation to embracing digital technology.

The findings could be used by hospitality managers to better understand employee intentions with regard to adopting digital technology, challenges faced and the way forward.

The authors’ research identified seven best practices of leading companies with a particularly aggressive “All-in-on-AI” approach to Artificial Intelligence technology. 10;

The article examines how successful companies are reskilling and upskilling their employees to help develop, interpret and improve AI systems.

To date, AI technologies are most commonly applied in making business processes more efficient, improving decisions and enhancing existing products and services, but “All-in-on-AI” companies eventually develop use cases across a wide variety of functions and processes, decisions and products or services.

While many have predicted that AI would replace humans, AI-powered companies see the primary goal as discovering how to get the best out of both by redesigning jobs, reskilling workers and becoming more efficient and effective in the process.

Companies seeking to get significant returns on their investment in AI should take note of the practices of leading firms.

This study aims to explore how coping strategies (CS) mediate the relationship between job insecurity (JI) and subjective well-being (SWB) leading to presenteeism among millennials. This study has been tested based on the conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 2001) and the transactional theory of stress and coping (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984). In India, employees in the information technology (IT) and business process management sectors have been facing increased job insecurity over the last couple of years. The advent of technology has increased job insecurity among millennials, specifically in the IT sector. The Indian IT and information technology–enabled service (ITES) sector witnessed mass retrenchments by companies in 2016–2017. Instead of reskilling, the companies decided to lay off their employees. During the pandemic, the IT and ITES industries witnessed a massive culture shift in terms of technology and work engagement. Postpandemic, the recession is looming large on these industries. In 2022, tech layoffs have witnessed 135,000 employees impacted globally and many may lose their job in the coming year. This study chose Indian millennials because they form a large part of the Indian workforce, especially in the IT and ITES sector.

In this study, cross-sectional design is used where different individuals are part of the study at the same point in time. A sequential mixed method of research is adopted for this study, owing to the kind of research questions and the requirement to include critical realism. A qualitative study was carried out post the quantitative study, to corroborate the results from the quantitative study. Quantitative methodologies address questions about causality, generalizability or magnitude of outcome, whereas qualitative research methodologies explore why or how a phenomenon occurs, describe the nature of an individual’s experience during the study relevant to the context and/or develop a theory (Fetters et al., 2013). Because the study is about the millennial workforce in IT and the ITES sectors, the sample population comprised employees in Delhi and the national capital region (NCR) of Delhi in northern India. Out of a total of 374 ITES companies listed in the national association of software and service companies (2018), 103 are based out of Delhi/NCR; hence, companies from Delhi/NCR were chosen for the study. The other reason for opting for companies based in Delhi/NCR was that many millennials from second- and third-tier cities also are employed in these companies bringing in varied cultural perspectives. This study included 588 employees working in ITES organizations based in the National Capital Region of India. Mediation analysis for statistical verification was carried out with regression-based analysis in SPSS macro process (version 4).

The impact of job insecurity on the positive and negative affects of the subjective well-being of millennials was found to be substantial. Coping strategies moderated the relationship and it was seen that both engaged and disengaged strategies of coping had an impact on the positive affect of subjective well-being but did not have any impact on the negative affect of subjective well-being. The positive affect of subjective well-being was negatively related to presenteeism, and the negative affect of subjective well-being was positively related to presenteeism.

This study is carried out only in the ITES industry and on millennials. With the advent of technology, other industries are going through challenges concerning layoffs even though the severity of the same might be less. In times to come, for strategizing employee engagement, it is necessary to understand how the workforce copes with various work-related stress factors. The positive affects and negative affects of well-being and responses have been studied from an employee perspective only. Further research should be conducted to explore responses from both employers and employees to establish presenteeism and the antecedents of presenteeism in conjunction with positive and negative affects of well-being. There is further scope to study the impact of job insecurity on adaptive presenteeism in older generations and various industries given the current job scenario and talent-reskilling issues.

This study brings forth original insights into the impact of constant job threats on millennials employed in the IT and/or IT service sectors. The key findings contribute to literature knowledge and help managers recognize the unfavorable consequences of continuous job threats on the well-being of employees. There is an immediate need for managers to recognize the problem and devise various policies and communication strategies to enable millennial employees to cope with the constant changes in the organization, owing to various technological, political and environmental factors. Organizations should be mindful of this impact, which can subsequently have serious consequences on the productivity of the employees, resulting in decreased overall performance and health of the organization.

This study of job insecurity as a job stressor, triggering coping strategies in Indian millennials working in the ITES and IT industry, presents original insights. This study explores and presents how the impact of job insecurity may increase presenteeism as a result of coping. This study brings value to practitioners and this study may help organizations improve the overall well-being of their employees, thus improving productivity. On the contrary, it also opens opportunities for exploring the impact of job insecurity as a challenge stressor.