Identify Skills Gaps By Working With Learners

By Christopher Rousset, Managing Director Americas & VP Global Alliances, LMS365

With so many rapid changes undergone by organizations this year, it’s easy to focus on making sure all the technology works and forget about the technology users. But for all that has changed, this truth has not: human resources remain an organization’s most valuable resource. Leaders need to support their employees now more than ever as they get used to working remotely and interacting with new tools. That includes providing them with the skills needed to maximize the use of those new tools.

It’s essential for businesses today to develop new skill sets in areas such as AI, SaaS, and remote collaboration to maintain productivity and a competitive edge. But for human resources and business leaders, it can be a challenge to know which skills and competencies to prioritize.

This occurs because the leaders who oversee learning and development

don’t always have the knowledge they need to adequately determine which skills their organization needs more of. This is critical knowledge to have, and leaders can easily partner with employees to find out. Creating a learning culture that combines the identification of the most relevant skills with the inclusion of employees in the skills development process will boost engagement, increase skills, and contribute to the company’s success overall.

Changing Times, Changing Skills

Technology continues to change rapidly, creating the need for additional skills or whole new skill sets. Not only are more skills needed, but training must be continuous and dynamic because those skills are changing fast. The half-life of professional skills was once 10-15 years; today, the half-life of a learned skill is five years, and it’s even shorter for technical skills.

Faced with new circumstances and constraints, organizations must rapidly innovate to effectively operate and maintain a competitive edge, finding new ways to work smarter and adopt new solutions. This increases the need for reskilling, scaling, and changing skills to strengthen organizations now and in the time following the pandemic.

Working With Learners

In today’s increasingly specialized organizations, business, HR, and learning/development leaders are not expected to have a detailed understanding of the work being done in specific parts of the organization – and that means they don’t necessarily know exactly what skills are needed.

Tackling this challenge requires a multi-step approach. To start, learning leaders need specialists on the team who work well together and have the knowledge to find out which skills are most relevant: This is an approach many organizations are developing, bringing on agile leadership that is more involved and investigative as opposed to just trying to predict everything.

Next, leaders need to incorporate learners’ insights and feedback into the process. Who knows better what skills are needed than the employees who are doing these jobs? Engaging employees and empowering them to identify the relevant skills – and then develop and build those skills – can go a long way. Not only does it help with overall productivity, but it increases employee engagement, and the value of employee engagement can’t be overestimated.

Advantages Of An Engaged Learning Culture

When skills acquisition becomes a collaborative process, organizations will see many benefits. These include:

• Increased productivity: Employees who have been trained well positively impact the productivity and success of your company.
• Improved recruiting and retention: A report by the Work Institute found that 77% of employee turnover could be prevented by employers. It also found that employers could expect to pay $680 billion in employee turnover costs in 2020. Employees are fully aware of their career options and have little hesitation going elsewhere to get their needs and aspirations met. Organizations that don’t do all in their power to upskill employees and promote from within are asking to contribute to that $680 billion sinkhole.
• Market advantage: Companies with employees who have the skills required for success have a competitive advantage over organizations that don’t. This is one of the hallmarks of long-term survival.
• Greater employee engagement: When you have a disconnect between what skills are available in the employee population and what skills are needed to effectively succeed in their work, it’s extremely frustrating and stressful for employees. Employee engagement will suffer and ultimately employee burnout in the organization can follow. So, changing this scenario is very important.

The most common metric for engagement is focused attention or enthusiasm towards a given task. Engagement is also measured by an employee’s willingness and commitment towards the goals and missions of the company they work for. When employees are engaged, it has been shown to have significant benefits in terms of their attitudes, health, and work performance.

Collaborative Development

This year brought massive disruption and with it, opportunities to learn from it. As organizations shifted quickly to remote work, they had to also equip employees with new skills to maintain business continuity. It has been a struggle for learning leaders to find the most effective way to prioritize upskilling and who should undergo it first. Partnering with employees helps solve this struggle because they have first-hand knowledge of what skills will propel them forward. Using this strategy, organizations can identify the skills gaps and offer those skills to workers in an ongoing cycle of development.