Develop Your Employees To Help Fill The Skills Gap

Developing your employees’ skills is more vitally important than ever. Companies are having difficulty hiring the people they need, and the problem is getting worse. The workforce recruitment and talent management firm, ManpowerGroup, reports that 45% of the organizations in its recent survey found that the skills they need were not available to them - the highest level since the firm started recording these statistics in 2006. For large employers, it’s even more problematic. Two-thirds of companies that have over 250 employees report talent shortages. When looking to hire, they find a lack of applicants in general, and for the people who did apply, many were missing the technical or people skills, educational background, or the experience needed. A quarter of the surveyed companies think it’s worse this year than last.

Digital skills like data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are being used across industries. IBM’s Institute for Business Value found that almost two-thirds of the CEOs it surveyed expect AI and automation will be among key skills that companies need. For example, in financial services, a recent Fannie Mae study of 184 lenders found that 60% expect to be using machine learning by the end of next year. While powerful technology is permeating just about every business, the useful life of learned skills is decreasing. IBM anticipates that half of the technical skills learned today will not be relevant in 5 years.

CEOs understand that business growth is dependent on the availability and quality of the workforce’s capabilities. Talent planning, therefore, must be imbedded in the fabric of any strategic plan. This goes well beyond the responsibility of only HR. The entire C-suite and, indeed, the entire organization, must mobilize to understand the talent available within the company. Then senior leadership must grasp how that stacks up against the current and future talent needs to plan for tomorrow. HR is central to managing the effort, but the entire enterprise must participate to assure that the needed talent will be available.

Technical skills are clearly needed and sought by most companies; yet, interpersonal and leadership skills top the list of traits required to navigate increasing complexity. What is more, your culture is key. Integrating digital technologies into a business requires a culture that values communication, teamwork, trust, and integrity. These traits combined with critical thinking, problem-solving, and conflict resolution allow people to lead and direct others. When change in the workplace is accelerating, flexibility, adaptability, and continuous learning are indispensable. Employees who combine hard and soft skills are well positioned to drive the organization forward, harnessing the power of the data revolution.

Outside recruitment of new talent is clearly a source of needed skills. To compete in an environment where candidates are scarce, your mission, values and culture must prove attractive to the people you want to hire. Millennials, and now iGen, list them as top reasons to choose a workplace, and this demographic is most likely to have the digital skills you seek. Businesses increasingly understand that “doing well by doing good” is more than a saying; it reflects values that are important to potential hires and current employees alike. Similar to how companies think about the customer experience, attracting new hires and retaining your staff require a high-quality workplace experience.

But hiring alone cannot fully fill the talent demand. Companies increasingly are looking to cultivate their own personnel as an essential talent source, and they are reaping the additional benefits that result. In fact, IBM’s survey found that CEOs ranked investing in people as the best way to drive performance. This investment increases the person’s value to the organization, while at the same time, increasing the employee’s job satisfaction and engagement. Both technical capabilities and soft skills can be developed in your employee base through management attention and leadership investment.

The investment can take on a myriad of forms. Personalized tailored learning programs on almost any topic can be designed to up-skill and new-skill employees according to their interests and the company’s needs. Companies are expanding internal and external learning opportunities, utilizing internal knowledge platforms, forming partnerships with universities, and employing MOOCs and other digital resources. Managers have a new appreciation for the long-employed technique of transfers across business units to expand an employee’s skill base and exposure. They also now see this as a means to catalyze innovation that occurs when fresh blood enters a new environment with an attitude to contribute and make things better. Moreover, as Microsoft found when studying its own workforce, when people network across departments they tend to stay, and have longer, more successful careers at the company. An added benefit is that managers who develop broad networks pass that good habit on to their staff.

A culture of continuous learning is a must-have for long-term success. It is indispensable for talent attraction, development, and retention. Talented people want to contribute effectively to the organization, and they appreciate when skill development is integral to their work and fits their experience and career goals. A learning culture nurtures an engaged and dedicated workforce, and when senior leadership recognizes the employee’s success in skill building, it gets better still. We cannot foresee precisely what future talent needs will be, but we do know that an employee’s desire to learn, and the organization’s support in helping them reach full potential, provides the edge in this digital age.