Dubai
A rise in cyber security threats and increased incidents of hacking are changing some of the job requirements that employers are hunting for, with talent in areas of cyber safety becoming more attractive for head hunters.
Michael Fraccaro, chief human resources officer at Mastercard, said skills around cyber safety, as well as those around analyzing data and analytics are increasingly in demand among employers.
“This one particular skill set is one that banks, merchants, governments are all looking for, and because this area (cyber security) has been around for many years, it’s actually expanded because of the expansion of digital. This is why we’re looking at how to create and build the skills with the people we have internally,” he said.
Fraccaro, whose human resources department receives around 250,000 jobs applications from around the world every year, said Mastercard has been investing to ensure they have the right type of skills to be at the forefront of cyber security challenges.
In an interview with Gulf News, he added that the trend towards digital payments presents additional challenges around fraud and security.
“A big trend we’re seeing is customers are shopping online instead of going to physical merchants, and we’re seeing that as being a really significant shift. When consumers are shopping online, they want to know that their credentials and their data are not going to be at threat of being stolen. That’s a big area of focus for us,” Fraccaro said.
He added, “We’re working very closely in bringing in new skills, so we recruit from government agencies that have knowledge in what hackers would potentially be looking at to prevent those threats from impacting our customers.”
Mastercard is currently working with teams in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Oxford to shift school curricula to focus on cyber security in order to instill such skill sets at an early level.
Internally, the growing reliance on technology is changing the nature of jobs, with many tasks now performed by artificial intelligence and smart software rather than people.
But Fraccaro said that doesn’t necessarily mean technology is taking over or replacing humans. Instead, it is making people more efficient, and changing the type of skill sets that employers are looking for.
“The challenge that you have is not that jobs will be eliminated; but that jobs will be different, so our focus is on how to retrain individuals for different skills. Already, in one of our service centres, if you look at financial reconciliation…we’re moving a lot of that to machines to do that type of job, and we’re retraining our teams to focus on other higher value activities,” he said.
And even before hiring a new employee, technology is even changing the way employers go about the hiring process.
“The opportunity we have is being able to respond almost instantaneously to a potential candidate to say, ‘Hi. Thank you very much for your application. We’re going to come back to you.’ But just having that instant connection has a dramatic impact in terms of a connection with a potential employer, and that’s a trend that we’re beginning to see in the human resources space; the use of technology in things like talent acquisition,” Fraccaro said.
Mastercard employs 13,000 around the world, with 600 of those in the Middle East in Africa.
