Identifying & Narrowing Your Business’ Skills Gap

Identifying & Narrowing Your Business’ Skills Gap

Have you noticed that your business’ innovation has been sluggish in the last few years? That you’re not able to compete in the marketplace like you did previously? Those two circumstances could be the result of a growing "skills gap" among the workforce, the result of the pandemic’s aftermath, economic factors and swiftly evolving technologies. The skills gap indicates a distance between employees’ existing skills and the actual abilities needed to complete vital jobs within your company.

If your business is impacted by the skills gap, you may be detecting its symptoms, which include a drop in productivity, project delays, inferior work quality and an overall difficulty in adopting new technology. Furthermore, your workers may be bearing the brunt of the issue by exhibiting low morale, less engagement and a general disinterest in innovating or evolving the business. You may be experiencing higher employee turnover than you’re accustomed to seeing in your business. These are signs that a disconnect exists between your employees’ existing skills and those which are required for them to enthusiastically move ahead in strategic and impassioned ways. In short, they’re disheartened, overwhelmed and ill-equipped to meet this moment in the lifespan of your business.

It’s time to take these symptoms seriously and act because the skills gap is growing and could potentially cause unfilled positions by the millions, stagnating business everywhere. How can you address the problems caused by the skills gap in your business? Take on narrowing your skills gap by taking the following actions:

Assess/Evaluate

• What isn’t getting done effectively right now? Where are you falling behind?
• Take stock of the skillsets currently represented in your workforce.
• Which are missing? Be sure to consider technical or mechanical challenges such as those around working with Artificial Intelligence (which may require employees to develop new skills in areas like data science, cybersecurity, or advanced technological literacy) as well as "people skills" (like communication, critical thinking, collaboration, mediation and resilience).
• Review future objectives and goals and how they are threatened without addressing the skills gap(s).

Determine Necessary Actions

• How can deficiencies be addressed?
• What training, upskilling (learning new or advanced skills to develop proficiency within a current role) and/or reskilling (acquiring entirely new skills as training to move into a different job or function) will get the team equipped to effectively handle challenges as soon as possible and well into the future.
• How can current senior employees be utilized to help train newer or less-skilled workers to bring them up to speed?

Providing for Training/Upskilling/Reskilling

• Create in-house training programs or pay employees to attend courses or workshops that will help them fill in those skill and knowledge gaps in a uniform and complete way.
• Provide on-the-clock time in which workers can engage with new technology or familiarize themselves with new procedures.
• Reward employees for taking initiative in building new skills and learning independently.
• Build training procedures for each role or department that account for continuing employee education so as to avoid skill gaps and assure that your team is always working fully armed and at the top of their game.

The skills gap is a growing problem and, if not addressed, can potentially harm your business by demoralizing your workforce to the point where even business as usual will be unsustainable, let alone vigorous growth. It’s important to take action to help your employees learn what they need in order to help your business thrive in these times.

Where are skill gaps showing up in your business?