Jan 26, 2007

No need for specialists

Prasad muses on the future of 'Specialist' roles in internal HR:
"What I have noticed is that the number of these positions are reducing. There could be many factors influencing this. Many organizations feel that these kind of deep specialist skills are not required on a continuous basis as they come into play mainly in special initiatives (or even only in particular phases of special initiatives) that happen once in a while. Thus this could lead to underutilization these costly expert talent which does not make sense either for the organization or for the specialists involved."

While I agree with him, I also feel that the future of specialist roles in MNCs in India is poised to grow further. The assumption being, once these firms cross a certain critical number of employees who are based in India (the number's criticality would depend on the nature of work being done by the India employees) there would be a business case for specialists to be based out of India.

Where I do agree with Prasad is the future of OD as a practice. He is spot on when he describes the 'distributed model' of OD within organizations. That however does not hold true for other specialist functions like compensation and benefits or HRIS.

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