Building Skills and Expanding Diversity: How Partners can grow in the Salesforce Economy

The recent release of the IDC whitepaper The Salesforce Economic Impact has highlighted the immense growth potential of the Salesforce economy. In this piece, Charles Woodall, SVP of Alliances and Channels, APAC, discusses how partners can leverage on the opportunities in the Salesforce economy through diversity-centred hiring and upskilling of their talent.

According to the recent IDC study The Salesforce Economic Impact, between now and 2026, the Salesforce economy will create new revenues that total US $1.6 trillion globally – a massive jump of more than 350% over that period. APAC’s slice is expected to reach US $377.6 billion. This includes 4,156,700 net new jobs generated in the region by 2026.

These figures are phenomenal and offer a truly exciting opportunity for our partners. As we travel together on this vertical growth period, it’s important that partners address closing the skills gap that is happening globally. In a digital-first world, one of the biggest challenges faced by companies is that there are just not enough people with the right digital skills to power their companies’ transformation now and in the future. Currently the demand for digital skills outweighs supply and the gap continues to widen due to an array of factors ranging from new emerging technologies to systemic social and economic inequities. The decisions companies make now around how — or whether — to solve the digital skills gap will echo for future generations.

According to McKinsey, over 90% of executives across the world are facing digital skills gaps in their workforces. This is particularly pertinent across the APAC region, where a majority of workforces are employed by SMEs. These SMEs have tended to put off digitisation efforts in past years, perhaps due to a misconception that such a shift would entail high costs.
Rather than seeing the digital skills gap as a problem to be solved, we can use this as an opportunity to create more diverse and inclusive workplaces.

One of the key considerations that should be considered in hiring net new talent should be diversity. Diversity gives you access to a greater range of talent, not just the talent that belongs to a particular world-view or ethnicity or some other restricting definition. It helps provide insight into the needs and motivations of all of your client or customer base, rather than just a small part of it. And, potentially, as McKinsey have shown, it makes your organisation more effective, more successful, and more profitable.

IDC’s research has also found that cloud-related technologies will make up 27% of digital transformation spending in 2021 and will rise to 37% by 2026, meaning that the demand for skilled digital workers is rising exponentially.

So, how is Salesforce approaching the digital skills gap? As part of the Talent Alliance, Salesforce provides training support such as Trailhead Virtual Bootcamp passes for under-represented hires, Exam Certification vouchers for people who do not have Salesforce certifications and Salesforce business practitioners to speak at part-led training cohorts. All of these initiatives will enable partners to have a team armed with the right skills to meet the demands of the market.

What can Partners like yourself do to help? If you aren’t already part of the Talent Alliance, we encourage you to sign up and pledge 20% of all new hires will be diverse and net-new to the ecosystem.

The Talent Alliance also invites partners to get involved with initiatives such as group mentoring, university symposiums. On top of that, we will be holding the Trailblazer Connect Career Fair in the ANZ and ASEAN regions on November 18, and one in India come January 2022.