Bhavesh Goswami is a stalwart in the Cloud Computing space with an illustrative experience of working in the development team of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Seattle. He honed his Cloud Computing skills at Amazon and helped ship the first version of S3 in 2006. With an enriched experience at AWS, he moved to Microsoft where he worked on challenging endeavours of Cosmos management, Cloud storage, and Big Data computational engine that comprised of a spectrum of Microsoft Online services, including Bing. Bhavesh began his entrepreneurial journey as Founder & CEO of CloudThat in 2012. An organization focused on empowering professionals and corporates on Cloud & Big Data, through training and consulting services. He is a passionate technocrat who has an illustrative scholastic career of delivering Keynote addresses and research talks at different international conferences. He has authored a wide array of research papers and has patents in various fields. As an enthusiastic technology practitioner, he ensures that CloudThat is driven by the latest technology and innovations.
Mentoring is a two-person relationship that promotes professional and personal development. Mentors serve as trusted advisors and role models, having “been there” and “done that.” They offer suggestions and knowledge, both general and specific, to their mentees to support and encourage them.
Skillsoft’s Global Knowledge 2021 IT Skills and Salary Report, emphasize that the IT industry is currently facing critical skills gaps that have increased 145% since 2016. This situation has forced IT organizations for seeking help from professional mentors to empower their workforce with new-age skills.
Maximizing the Benefits of Professional Mentorship
Though organizations are working relentlessly to assess the skill gaps of the workforce and bridge them, they find it quite challenging to focus both on their core business and at the same time empower the employees. This is where professional training companies can chip in as mentors with resources and experience to understand the pain points of the modern workforce. Further, they devise a framework that can be leveraged to deliver one-one mentorship in the new learning paradigm.
Such professionally designed mentorships offer a plethora of benefits to organizations. Importantly, it fosters diversity and inclusion amongst team members, helps to nourish new managers, strengthens organizational culture, helps retain talents. Here are the generic advantages a professional mentorship alliance will bring to the table:
Bridging the skill gap– According to New McKinsey Global Survey statistics, 87% of their respondents are facing the challenge of handling skill gaps in the next five years. Also, according to the latest Gallup report, a highly engaged workforce increases profitability by 21% and as per Trade Press Services survey, 85% of employees are most motivated when internal communications are effective.
Professional mentors like CloudThat can enable organizations to bridge the skill gaps and create a highly engaging environment where the workforce operates in coordination ensuring both organizational and individual growth.
Building connections – Building connections with members of different teams always helps to gain necessary skills and competency in modern work environments. For instance, an IT team that functions by having better communication between design, development, testing, and deployment team members will hugely benefit the organizations with better productivity.
Professional mentors help the mentees to understand the importance of building connections with different teams within an organization. Moreover, the learning that happens by interactions has a greater impact on individual growth. It contributes to the development and expansion of a network of personal and professional contacts that is virtually impossible to quantify.
Strengthening leadership capabilities– The role of leaders is multifaceted and they not only lead the teams but also take up initiatives, come up with innovative ideas, create a strong bonding amongst team members and work towards accomplishing common goals. Grooming the workforce to take up newer challenges as leaders is always a critical requirement for any organization. Professional mentors enable organizations to build a strong pool of leaders through systematically designed training frameworks.
Advantages of Leveraging Employee Empowerment
Professional Mentors help organizations to nurture the workforce with hands-on training, inculcate goal-setting abilities, enable them to think independently and deliver the expectations of the organization to the fullest. Here are the advantages professional mentorship brings in for employee empowerment.
Igniting curiosity amongst employees- As technology and automation are bringing in rapid changes across all the domains. Professional mentors help to ignite the flame of curiosity for continuous learning amongst the workforces. Thus, a workforce that is willing to be in the path of continuous learning ensures enhanced productivity to the organization by utilizing the benefit of professional mentorship.
Foster willingness to try new things- The onslaught of pandemics has forced organizations to think differently and take risks. Professional mentors help organizations to have a culture of new things and create willingness. They come up with idea boxes, brainstorming sessions, reward and incentivize new ideas. Thus, helping organizations to foster a willingness to try new things.
Harness abilities to determine strength and weakness- Professional mentors help organizations to assess their strengths and weakness with precision. Mentors guide them to build on their strong areas and find out ways to improvise in the areas they are lagging. For instance, CloudThat utilizes an in-house Capability Development Framework- (a holistic skill development framework aimed at skilling the modern workforce across all stages) to assess the strength and weaknesses of an organization’s workforce in its first stage thus helping to harness the abilities to determine strength and weakness.
Technology Tools for Incubating Mentorship & Employee Empowerment
The state-of-the-art technology tools exhibit capabilities to streamline the process of Professional Mentorship and Employee Empowerment. For instance, the Learning Needs Analysis (LNA) Tool and Capability Development Framework are in-house products of CloudThat that work in tandem to deliver best-in-industry mentorships and employee empowerment. While the Learning Needs Analysis tool assesses the skill gaps by identifying the existing capability levels of your organizational workforce and the expected competencies to meet the organizational objectives. The data aggregated by the LNA tool acts as the input to the Capability Development Framework (CDF), which allocates specialized mentors to address individual groups, assess their learning phase, create one-to-one sessions to solve their difficulties to speed up the upskilling process. Concisely, the Capability Development Framework is a holistic skill development framework aimed at skilling the modern workforce across all stages with a guaranteed ROI of mentoring and nurturing them to be project ready and billable.
Using innovative Professional Mentorship & Employee Empowerment tools, which are scientifically designed to provide a holistic learning solution with customized learning pathways and purposeful ROI, can ensure the overall development of your workforce. Learning Needs Analysis tools and Capability Development Frameworks discussed in this article helps candidates to gain valuable advice, hone knowledge and skills, comprehend new perspectives, strengthen and progress in career roles with project-ready skills as an asset for an organization.