Global upheaval has been our norm for the last few years, with unpredictable economic stability fuelled by well-understood reasons. As organisations reset and recalibrate, it’s increasingly clear that there’s a widening skills gap – a chasm between what organisations need to thrive and what their people can currently do. It’s crucial for organisations to bridge the skills gap today and plan for skills abundance in the future.
In this article, we look at:
- What do we mean by ‘skills’?
- Five ways to bridge your organisation’s skill gap
- How Fitzgerald can help
What do we mean by ‘skills’?
Skills and qualifications are often used interchangeably but they are, in fact, very different. Qualifications are proven levels of achievement awarded by recognised professional bodies.
Skills have been referred to as ‘soft skills’ – now increasingly called ‘essential skills’– and include:
- Communication and social skills. These skills are needed for team building, conflict resolution and collaborative work – as well as, of course, customer interaction and sales.
- Problem solving, adaptability and flexibility. These skills give individuals the ability to take initiative within appropriate work boundaries.
- Critical and analytical thinking. These skills enable employees to understand the importance of every detail and time management, too.
- Creativity and innovation. These skills allow employees to think of new ways to approach things or simply support the act of creating new products or services to sell.
Despite being both vital and transferable, none of these essential skills come with any kind of universally recognised certificate attached. This makes identifying and closing the skills gap within your organisation more nuanced.
1. Through conducting a skills gap analysis
Identifying critical roles and their skill requirements is the first step to knowing how to identify the skills gap in your organisation. You need to do a thorough audit of what you need from your workforce to achieve your business goals, and what’s missing – both now and in your succession planning. This becomes your robust, repeatable skills gap analysis process that can be rolled out across your entire business.
Understanding what you need
At an organisational level, you need to clearly identify the skills gaps that exist in your roles and the effectiveness of your current solutions. It’s also important to look at your business development strategy and see how you’re planning for the future skills you need as you grow, pivot, automate, or relocate.
Understanding what you have
Depending on the size of your organisation, it may be beneficial to look at the skills individuals have department by department. You can evaluate your current pool of skills through surveys, assessments and interviews.
Once you’ve done this, the skills gap you need to bridge will immediately become clear.
It’s also useful to prioritise your desired skills, in line with how important they are to achieving your business aims. This helps you determine which training needs are most urgently required.
2. Performance appraisals become growth conversations: A reframing
The traditional annual performance appraisal is broadly focused on telling an employee how well they’ve contributed to the company. But reframing this into a conversation about how each individual can develop their skills and professional growth is part of the answer to bridge your skills gap.
It’s a mindset shift that HR professionals can lead, modelling ways to support employees’ development with training and more responsibilities. This puts the individual at the heart of the process, as it gives them the opportunity to progress in their career path. But it also helps you build teams with the exact skills you need.
Gallup research revealed that only 14% of employees strongly agree that performance reviews ‘inspire them to improve’– the opposite of what any employer wants. How are you going to bridge your skills gap if there’s no impetus from the employees’ side?
This is why your appraisal format needs to move from an expectation of criticism – that’s often tied to promotion, bonus or salary increase – and turned into a conversation around professional growth. Successes and areas for development must still be discussed – but within a framework that has development as its overarching aim.
3. Develop individual strengths
It’s important that employers start with where their employees are.
Employees may be on the cusp of mastering a particular skill, but just falling short. Looking at the skills they demonstrate potential in will be a quick win for skill development within your business.
The UK’s Essential Skills Taskforce worked on research to solve the existing skills gap for employers. They created the Skills Builder Universal Framework – “a clear, measurable and authoritative framework that sets out how essential skills can be identified in practice. It provides a common language that both education providers and employers can easily understand and adopt.”
This defines nine essential skills, breaks them down into development steps and provides support for everyone involved in the process. The nine essential skills are: listening, speaking, problem solving, creativity, staying positive, aiming high, leadership and teamwork.
The Skills Builder Universal Framework is an incredibly useful tool to use with each individual, to identify their strengths and also, more importantly when we’re talking about a skills gap, areas for development – as well as having a roadmap for how to achieve this. It also shows them why these essential skills are just as important to their employers as professional qualifications.
4. Empower your managers
“36% of employers disagree that their people managers receive adequate training on how they develop their people. Line managers need to be supported to nurture the growth and development of all staff to ensure continuous development at work.” CIPD, ‘Employer views on skills policy in the UK.’
Your line managers are in the best position to identify essential skills strengths and weaknesses in your workforce. But if these line managers aren’t upskilled appropriately, you lose all that valuable information. Not only that, but they’re the 1:1 contact person as employees work through their skills development programmes. That’s a lot of support to give, especially if you’re not trained.
Managers may benefit from:
- Introducing a frequent, low-stakes feedback loop that’s a discussion about improvement possibilities, instead of one often stressful annual appraisal process.
- Giving them access to external help from expert speakers or trainers to upskill teams and individuals.
- Providing internal mentoring from senior management.
5. Put it in writing!
To ensure that your intention to bridge your organisation’s skills gap is known (and followed through), it’s wise to outline it within your overall HR strategy. After all, this requirement for essential skills also has an impact on other areas of HR, such as recruitment. So, having your recruitment process and skills development plan knitted together in one document keeps the focus on the aims of your overall people plan.
It also means that your commitment to skills training has the same status as all the other elements that comprise your comprehensive HR strategy. Making the link between essential skills and the aims of your business strategy in writing is a powerful way to signal your intentions as a company.
We’re here to help you build those bridges
You don’t have to undertake all of this by yourself. If you’re looking to revise your people strategy to include essential skills, change the culture of your appraisal process, rethink job descriptions to include essential skills requirements, or integrate skills strategy into your HR policy, please get in touch. You can contact a member of our team at office@fitzgeraldhr.co.uk, or on 0330 223 5253.
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