January 14, 2022

#180: Tej Arora on skill development challenges in the tech industry, choosing the right solutions for up-skilling, and tips for leaders investing in L&D programs

23 minutes

On this episode, our guest is Tej Arora, CTO of Guardinex. They protect businesses and their customers from identity frauds.

Tej grew up in Hyderabad, India, and did his Bachelors in Computer Science at IIT, Madras. Soon after he moved to the US to pursue his masters. Tej has over 25 years of experience and has worked with giants like Oracle, Netscape, and Yahoo.

His curious mind and passion to keep learning made him re-skill and look at cloud infrastructure through a customer’s lens. He then went on to learn and achieve certification in AWS. Tej also published his AWS knowledge through videos.

Episode highlights:

1. HR priorities for reinventing business strategies

Due to the pandemic, the entire globe is a marketplace for searching talent. It opens up tremendous options that encourage job-hopping and taking up multiple gigs. To deal with this landscape, HR should not enforce tight employee guidelines but provide flexibility to take multiple gigs. Having a nice blend of home and office work helps, according to Tej. Slack, Zoom, cloud tools should be allowed to make remote setup employee-friendly.

2. Upskilling challenges in the tech industry

As per Tej's experience, employees don't utilise the budget companies allocate for upskilling programmes. Companies should incentivise employees to encourage upskilling. Periodic conversations with employees and L&D should be strengthened to minimise upskilling challenges. L&D should become part of management employee conversation to overcome upskilling challenges.

3. How to find the right solutions for L&D and upskilling?

The younger generation commonly uses cloud-based tools these days. Employees shouldn't face the hassles of using multiple tools for different assignments, and therefore, these tools must have SSO support. Slack-like tools should be integrated for VC tools and cloud storage along with social networks. It would encourage employees to share the courses they have taken up on their social media accounts.

Follow Tej on LinkedIn

Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast host: Rohan Mankad

About Springworks:
Springworks is a fully-distributed HR technology organisation that is building tools and products to simplify recruitment, on-boarding, employee engagement and retention.

The product stack from Springworks includes:
SpringVerify — B2B verification platform
EngageWith — employee recognition and rewards platform that enriches company culture
Trivia — a suite of real-time, fun and interactive games platform for remote/hybrid team-building
SpringRole — verified professional-profile platform backed by blockchain, and
SpringRecruit — a forever-free applicant tracking system

Springworks prides itself on being an organisation focused on employee well-being and workplace culture leading to a 4.8 rating on Glassdoor for the 200+ employee strength company.