As we all know, Amazon is a company with a distinct business strategy and the organizational capacity of executing flawlessly through its people while achieving world-class business results.
This past week, Amazon announced that it plans to spend $700 million on retraining and upskilling nearly one third of its American workforce so that they will have the competencies to take on higher level jobs and boost productivity for the firm. This marks one of the world’s largest employee retraining efforts as Amazon has set a goal of retraining approximately 100,000 workers in the U.S. by 2025 according to a report by the New York Times.
Amazon understands the impact that technology and automation will have on the business in the coming years and decades ahead and has smartly decided to invest in training for its employees. Beside technical skills, companies who are taking a proactive Human Capital strategy are also making heavy investments in leadership training, business acumen training, and strategic business selling training so their employees are able to keep up with the other changes in the business such as advanced AI-driven analytics and systems that will revolutionize the way businesses operate today.
As these changes occur at an increasingly rapid rate, the types of skills that companies value will have a more pronounced impact on business results including the creation of shareholder value. While there are some small-minded leaders who may think. “Why should an individual contributor moving boxes know how to understand a ‘P&L’ or other financial reports?”, other more evolved business leaders realize that having a solid foundation of business acumen training and an understanding of the way disparate companies operate is becoming increasingly important because it helps everyone become aligned around the strategy, objectives, and key results. Visionary organizations – including some cited by a recent Wall Street Journal article - such as Walmart, AT&T, Accenture, and others realize this is just more than an investment, it’s a necessity of survival. And to them, survival is dependent upon the next generation of leaders who are going to have to do things quicker with more data and less time.
Another outcome of increasing automation of more basic tasks means that employees are spending less time on routine work and increasingly are being made to execute company strategy and make business decisions in corporate managerial roles. Unfortunately, we find that way too many organizations and their leaders are woefully unprepared because they don’t have a strong business acumen foundation and quickly become lost, ineffective, paralyzed, and then unproductive.
If that doesn’t get you thinking, this certainly will: with unemployment in the US at historically low rates and the prospect of potential talent shortages in the near future, organizations should be panicked about their current and future talent. Employees are going to be hired and fast-tracked into positions they are completely unqualified for because there simply are no other choices. Mistakes in strategy, operations, marketing, sales, and finance will be made because there is no in-depth understanding of the system of business. The good news is that tools exist to help take human capital strategies and put them into action. For example, digital business simulations leverage the latest in technology and enable participants to learn about leadership, business, and sales more quickly and efficiently than any other methodology in the market. Just like Amazon, you need to have a strategy and the human capital to execute it flawlessly.