To ensure that you have the right digital transformation talent on your team to continue to move forward, you’ll need people with the right skills to make it happen. This can be a major challenge. You also can’t simply blame the state of the labor market for the lack of skills within your organization. Creating a strategic way to attract and retain this digital transformation talent is the only way to make a change and get the skills that you need.

Joe McKendrick, author, independent researcher and speaker exploring innovation, information technology trends and markets, wrote an article in Forbes about how to find and keep people within your organization who will help keep your digital transformation on track. He spoke with Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer at Amazon, and Scott Snyder, partner with Heidrick & Struggles, about how to attract and retain digital transformation talent.

Here are the eight ways that they identified:

1. Seek and encourage a diversity of skills. It can be tempting to focus on gaining new technical talent during your transition, but a better strategy would be to integrate new digital transformation talent with the domain knowledge that comes from legacy employees. In addition to technical talent, you need customer-centric employees that can understand what customers want. Don’t disregard one for the other.
2. Be open to new types of jobs. Take the time to look beyond the typical jobs that everyone is battling for in today’s workforce—the designers, developers and data scientists. You may soon need an AI specialist in your HR department. Look at internal employees, external hires, partners and freelancers to fill new jobs like behavioral scientists, journey mappers, solution finders that could become your digital transformation talent.
3. Encourage autonomy and an entrepreneurial spirit. Employees should be able to follow their ideas and feel accountable for them.
4. Encourage a “venture” mindset. Managers need entrepreneurial or digital skills to drive a disruptive innovation opportunity. It’s important to have a balance of product and technology expertise that is directly relevant to the market you are pursuing.
5. Build from within. Offer your employees development opportunities that are customized for each individual. Whether you provide new training, a leadership opportunity, or the chance to experience a new part of your organization, it’s important to foster the employees that you already have.
6. Build a fun and rewarding culture. This could potentially be your greatest challenge, depending on your current culture. However, it’s essential in today’s digital economy for digital transformation talent.
7. Focus on the power of data. Digital business models require experts who view data as an essential element of future value creation, regardless of the specific expertise they bring to the company.
8. Plan for balanced AI-human capabilities. You’ll need to identify which activities in your organization should be optimized for machines, which should be for humans, and which will work in a hybrid model.

If you’re interested in learning how an Oracle Cloud HCM equipped company puts these principles in to action, check out how AutoZone uses Oracle Cloud HCM Talent Management.