Employees should upskill to stay relevant in 2021: Hays

They need to adapt to the highly digitalising environments across industries.

As the rapid evolution and acceleration of technology takes over a broad spectrum of industries, hopeful employees would have to develop their skillsets, recruiting experts Hays said, noting it as one of Singapore’s top talent trends for 2021.

“The implementation of emerging tech is changing the very fabric of Singapore’s recruitment market,” said Hays’ regional director in Singapore Grant Torrens. “We are seeing companies nationwide not only exploring how technology and digitalisation can improve and advance functions, but also looking into how they may negate any detrimental issues that their products and services may provoke.”

As COVID-19 is highly transmissive in nature, many organisations will “look to talent in user interface and user experience to create the bridge between designers and developers so that they may compete for users’ attention on both the internet and the mobile space,” Hays said.

Digital marketers have also been playing an increasingly important role across many industries, and social media users pay attention to what organisations post now more than ever, so they would “need to be more proactive in promoting social media transparency.”

The compliance sector would also see technology altering how it works, with fintech companies using digital trading platforms, leading to payments firms and cryptocurrency trading firms seeking out strong risk and compliance talents.

Digital transformation has also grown rampant in the legal sector, and “legal teams will be required to be more innovative in the use of new technologies, particularly in customer connection and attraction tactics, a state of affairs that is applicable to both in-house departments and law firms,” Hays said.

The same could be said for the public sector, as talents with emerging technology skills such as cloud and DevOps would be highly sought to help transform traditional infrastructure platforms into digital environments.

Hays also noted that the future of healthcare would be powered by technology, with the “implementation of medical devices that incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning to efficiently diagnose conditions in everything from clinical trials to clinical practices, allowing for more personalised, targeted treatments based on patient needs.”

Overall, organisations would find flexible solutions to staffing challenges as uncertainty still reigned in the market. “Budgetary constraints have led companies to evolve their staffing strategy, with contract and project-based hiring becoming more prevalent,” said Hays, noting that this system would be more prevalent in the financial services, technology, education, and consulting sectors.