Why Organization reskills their Employees to become Data Scientists?

Data Science is one of the most demanding careers nowadays, and it is expected that the demand for data scientist will create a huge scarcity for talents in the future. Therefore, most of the businesses are retraining their current workforce as data scientists. It would be a challenge for the firms to find experienced data science experts. So they are organizing training for their existing employees with data science talents to bridge the skill gaps. Data science is one of the sizzling topics of this year because the data-driven operations support employees to perform better throughout the board. The data helps to improve the performance of marketers, salespeople, and consultants and also in enhancing the overall productivity of an organization. The organizations agree that data can assist in achieving the business objectives, but when it comes to data scientist’s one problem begins to arise that is, lack of talented people.

International Data Corporation, i.e. IDC forecasts that by 2019, around 181,000 candidates with profound analytical abilities and five times that number of people with data management and interpretation skills will be required for the businesses in the US. As of now, however, there are insufficient talented data scientists to address that issue. So how organizations can search applicants that can fill these positions? In order to begin this, the organizations have to look inside and start to understand the advantages of retraining their staff to become data scientists.

Why is retraining important?

Retraining of employees is essential because technical enhancements and new business developments want employees to have new or improved abilities. Some of the organizations provide retraining program as their employees have a lack of definite work requirements or unable to remember how to use them under existing working conditions. Retraining programs are helpful when they improve long-term productivity, reduce mistakes and remove safety concerns. Retraining programs are important because it helps employees to maintain and create efficient task-specific abilities which help their companies to proceed further. Some reskilling program within the organization demonstrates those skills which not only enhance overall productivity but also help to improve product and services. Additionally, it is essential to retrain your team as it enhances worker’s reliability, and increase confidence.

Why reskill your employees?

Well, the organizations are retraining their existing employees due to the following reasons:

1. Retraining to provide employees the new skills: Many organizations are continuously introducing new techniques and development; thus it is important to educate employees about the latest developments. Workers also appreciate new enhancements and learning. Many worker’s state that training and development opportunities influence their decision to stay in the organization. It is found that 40% of the employees who are not given proper job training leave their job within the first year and also without professional development a worker is more probable to be hopeless and exit from the company. This implies that the training and development of individual employees should be the highest requirement.

A couple of years back “coding trend” was observed in the organization, where numerous companies trained their workers to become basic programmers. In order to improve the technical abilities throughout the organization and enhance productivity, companies are providing training to every employee. A company named Free Cause finished a Codinization Project that brought together technical and non-technical workers so that everybody in the company figures out how to code. Due to this idea, hundreds of employees across all types of industries became proficient in coding skills. Now, organizations are adopting the same approach to address the wide talent gap in data science.

2. Business incentives of retraining employees: Peter Cappelli, a Wharton management Professor carried out a study that why some companies hire new employees, whereas other retrains their current employees. He also observed the impact which each had on social capital, or relationships within an office and how well staffs work together and found the following exciting outcomes:

If an organization selects not to reskill or re-educate their existing workers with new ones, then in the process social networks in the workplace are interrupted and also the social capital is demolished. On the other hand, if organizations retrain their current employees, it preserves their social networks and keeps social capital. This study represents that it is essential to retrain the employees, as most of the companies depend on social capital to function properly.

Also, an economic incentive is one of the huge reasons for businesses to retrain their existing employees in place of hiring new candidates. An investigation demonstrates that the direct cost of substituting an employee can reach as high as 50 to 60 % of their annual salary. When this is added to the associated costs the total of recruiting a new person can reach upto 90 to 200% of their annual salary.  IBM decided to reskill their employees instead of having redundancies, providing employees with 90% of their salary while they learned new skills like the cloud, analytics, and mobile. In place of recruiting new employees and firing old ones with this set of job expertise, IBM decided to invest internally.

3. Reskilling employees as Data Scientists: It is estimated that by 2020, the number of data science occupations in the US will be more than 490,000. But the qualified and eligible candidates to fill these employments will be fewer than 2, 00,000. According to a report, it is found that on a worldwide scale the demand will go beyond the supply by 50%. One problem is that universities are not conducting any undergraduate program in Data Science, and those who carry out this can’t stay aware of new and evolving innovations.

With the help of new, innovative data science training camps and custom corporate training programs organizations are able to skill current employees with a technical background to become a data scientist in a few weeks.  Any employees who have the coding knowledge would now be able to train to become a proficient in R, Spark, and Python, Hadoop, or any custom training prospectus to fulfill the organization’s Data science requirements.

Conclusion

With the help of these options, organizations would now be able to consider the reskilling of existing employees instead of recruiting new employees and bringing about social and money related expenses. In addition to the financial advantages, organizations that reinvest in their workers have lower turnover rates and more joyful workers. So we should take the lesson gained from the effective coding training camps and apply those to teach employees data science as well.

Got any questions for us? Please mention it in the comments section and we will return it to you. At ZaranTech we offer a self-paced online training program for Data Science and various other topics. Skyrocket your career by learning from the best! You can also visit our website for more engaging and informative articles.

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