It’s common for employees to want to build skills at work, but an effective learning infrastructure isn’t as common. As organizations grow, they tend to lose track of their people’s skills. Leaders don’t know the competencies employees have acquired at work, what they can do next, and the skills they can develop to grow their contributions to the organization.
Employers often don’t dig too deeply either, preferring instead to seek fresh talent externally when a need presents itself. But even if the current job market could support it, it’s difficult to maintain the hiring pace needed to source emerging skills from the outside. This reality leads to persistent understaffing and longer role vacancies.
It’s imperative to build a skills-based organization that can flex to evolving business and employee needs. But where to start?
The following five strategies may prove helpful as you seek to solve today’s labor shortage conundrum with your own reliable and already proven workforce.
Understand the size and composition of your workforce
Using analytics programs, employers should determine the current internal and external trends in workforce supply and demand. Examine the gap between the skills possessed by your workforce today and the skills your business requires to be successful now and in the future.
It might be beneficial to use a skills segmentation matrix that includes the variables of scarcity (how common or uncommon the skill is in the market), criticality (how essential or non-essential the skill is for work to be successfully completed), and volume (how much volume of this skill the business requires).
Seek feedback on your matrix from a diverse group of stakeholders across the organization, and during your investigation, determine the in-house superstars in in-demand areas. You can then enlist the help of these employees in crafting appropriate strategies and training to boost the organization’s overall level of skill competency.
For the rest of the article, head over to the Dayforce blog.
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