If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that having the right staff with the right skills at the right times is absolutely crucial for adapting quickly to change.
Staying competitive in business requires a proactive approach to talent management. So how exactly do you identify the skill gap in your organization? And what are the necessary steps to future-proof your business?
The pace of growth and change these days means that the organizations that don’t keep up are left behind. Future-proofing is about having the skills, talent and capacity to adapt to the many and consistent changes in the market and economy. Let’s explore why future-proofing is essential for business and how to address the skill gap:
The Benefits of Conducting a Skill Gap Analysis
So why go through the effort of conducting a skill gap analysis? Well, your business can risk becoming inefficient and unprofitable or it can address the skill gap and move forward while you gain invaluable insights into your workforce.
1. Helps With Strategic Workforce Planning
Know who you need to hire and train, and when and how they can help you achieve your organization’s objectives.
2. Get an Overview of the Whole Organization
Determine which departments don’t have the necessary resources and explore the skills each team requires training in or where new hires need to be brought in to fill gaps.
3. Improve Your Long-Term Recruitment Strategy
Avoid hiring reactively each time a new need arises. Gain the ability to foresee where and when skill gaps are going to appear.
4. Increase Productivity
By training existing employees to fill the skills gap, they will become more productive. Training can be used to fill gaps now and address any skills gaps that may arise in the future while employees are getting the career development they want.
5. Beat the Competition
By filling in areas of weakness and anticipating recruitment needs, you can stay ahead of the competition and become innovative leaders in your industry.
How To Identify the Skill Gap In Your Business
1. Uncover Your Business Objectives
Once you have determined your business objectives, you can identify the talent needed to achieve those goals. Use each objective area to assess your team’s capability and pinpoint the areas with the biggest gap in readily available skills.
2. Undertake Performance Reviews
Employee performance reviews offer an effective way to survey your staff and spot skill gaps. Assess your staff’s current skills based on your current and future needs. You can use this data to track employee progress, which allows you to measure performance against desired outcomes and better determine the specific areas to improve to fulfill business objectives more effectively.
3. Discover Which Skills Your Employees Need
Use the results of your performance reviews to identify where your team needs to improve in order to fill the skills gap. It can also be a useful tool to check against your latest job descriptions to see how well the list of skills match. Consult department managers to check the lists of required skills are accurate, then you’ll know exactly which areas of improvement for employees are most important.
4. Design Learning and Development Plans
The information gleaned from your skills gap analysis will become the framework of your plans for improvement. Use this data to determine which training, workshops and courses can benefit your employee. You’ll likely require training plans specific for each department or job to be used in future which will help prevent ongoing skill gaps.
The Solutions To Address Any Skill Gap You May Discover.
1. Training and Upskilling Employees
One way to build resilience and agility in your workforce is to invest in staff training. Regular training opportunities provide staff with the tools they need to acquire new skills and expertise, which is beneficial to their personal development as well as the company’s growth.
Despite the initial costs, training and upskilling can:
● Improve employee satisfaction
● Encourage better productivity
● Boost competitiveness
● Reduce skills gap and employee turnover
● Introduce innovation and creativity
2. Hiring New Talent
Companies frequently find themselves with skill gaps that aren’t readily filled by existing staff. If you’re looking to bring new ideas and energy into your company, hiring new talent can not only help address specific skill gaps in your organization but can also diversify talent and reduce over-dependence on individual personnel.
Quality candidates bring more to the table than the specific skills they possess. They can contribute fresh ideas, diverse opinions and are essential if the company wants to grow.
3. Outsourcing Projects
Businesses sometimes lack specialist or technical skills within their existing team and need to outsource to get the skills and experience needed to fulfill their requirements.
Outsourcing allows your business access to talent and capability that you may not have in-house and also provides coverage for busy periods when internal staff are stretched, so they can concentrate on what they do best while specialists take care of key projects.
The best part is that outsourcing can be less expensive than hiring permanent employees to perform the same task, which can be crucial when handling ad-hoc project work or when budgets are tight.
Future-Proofing Starts Today
Organizations need to anticipate the skills and talent they will need in the future and put in place a plan to fill skill gaps. Effectively done, future-proofing can be achieved through a combination of staff training, new talent hiring, and outsourcing. Essentially, successful companies understand that their employees are their lifeline to success when it comes to future-proofing.
When you’ve determined the skill gap and broken it down into the processes and activities alongside the skills and competencies needed to do the work, accountability metrics can be introduced to measure how effectively the work is organized and distributed.
Planning and visualizing the future of the workforce is becoming crucial for businesses to thrive. Orgvue’s organizational design software can help you model your organization, assess the impact and design with confidence.
Orgvue’s workforce planning tools can help your business monitor productivity and trim back work where too much effort is being invested in particular activities, allowing your organization to redirect effort elsewhere. Most importantly, it also means the financial impact of these changes can be tracked.
Continued success into the future means making organizational design a habit, not a one-time project.
