Develop Your Employees to Help Fill the Skills Gap

Developing your employees’ skills is more vitally important than ever. The workforce recruitment and talent management firm ManpowerGroup reported 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 reported talent shortages. When looking to hire, they found a lack of applicants in general, and for the people who did apply, many were missing the technical or people skills, educational background or experience needed. A quarter of the surveyed companies thought it was worse than a year ago.

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 placing the responsibility only on human resources. 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’s 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 member experience, attracting new hires and retaining your staff requires a high-quality workplace experience.

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 increases the employee’s job satisfaction and engagement. Both technical capabilities and soft skills can be developed in your employee base through attention from management and leadership investment. Microsoft found when studying its own workforce that 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.

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. For example, cybersecurity is no longer an issue reserved strictly for CIOs and CISOs. CEOs and senior leadership must be adept at communicating new cyber-risk management behaviors and how to create a vigilant culture that is aware of these significant new risks. What’s more, a recent Fannie Mae study of 184 lenders found that 60% of organizations expect to be using machine learning within the 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 five years.

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.

Stuart R. Levine is Chairman and CEO of Stuart Levine & Associates in West Palm Beach, Fla.