Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

SHRM Conference Recap: Solving the Applied Technology Skills Gap

Recently, DeVry University’s Career Advisory Board presented a session on the applied technology skills gap at the Society for Human Resource Management’s Annual Conference in Chicago.

As defined in DeVry University’s Career Advisory Board’s 2017 JPI survey, applied technology skills (ATS) are skills needed by employees to leverage the right technology to do their jobs. When an individual has ATS, they have the ability to integrate people, processes, data, and devices to effectively inform business strategy and plan for and react to unanticipated shifts in direction.

The JPI study confirmed that ATS are on hiring manager’s radars. Nearly 69% of JPI survey respondents agreed with this statement: “When I interview a prospective candidate, the presence of applied technology skills and experience is a competitive differentiator.” And, the desire for leaders to have these skills is even greater – 76 percent of managers who hire senior-level candidates agreed.

Why are ATS so important? As a workforce author and consultant, I believe that it’s helpful for anyone working in business today to leverage technology to sharpen their skills in critical thinking, decision-making and problem-solving, draw inferences from a variety of data sources, and understand overall digital infrastructure and how it can drive process efficiency and improvement.

Bringing ATS On Board

Training employees in these skills, however, can be a bit of a challenge. Also, technology is evolving more quickly than in the past, so skill acquisition can’t happen all at once and must be frequently revisited.

Fortunately, in our recent JPI study, we found that most hiring manager respondents are continuously training and retraining on ATS through internal courses and trainings (78 percent), tuition reimbursement (35 percent) and external courses and trainings (31 percent). Only 25 percent said their organizations are taking no action to develop the ATS skillset.

For the rest of the recap, head over to the DeVryWORKS site.

My Takeaways from the ATD Tech Skills Gap Panel

The technology skills gap is a well-known issue in American employment circles. Yet, research tends to focus on only one aspect of the problem – the shortage of hard tech skills like programming and information security management. But there is another, perhaps even more critical dimension to the technology skills gap¹: the lack of applied tech skills in the workplace.

As we’ve talked about previously, when an individual has applied tech skills,² they can integrate people, processes, data, and devices to effectively inform business strategy and plan for and react to unanticipated shifts in direction.

At the annual Association for Training and Development (ATD) conference³ in San Diego, I moderated an applied technology skills gap panel with John Aquilino, Manager, Skills Gap Training and Services, DeVryWORKS; Jessica DiCicco, VP, Learning & Development, Randstad; Jackie Linton, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer, City of Philadelphia; Kristen Switzer, Sr. People Development Manager, Taylor Morrison; and Andre Walker, VP of Training & Development, Securitas Security Services.

Applied Technology Skills: Why Now?

I began by asking the panel why applied technology skills have become so critical in business. “Everyone in our company, whether they are in construction, purchasing, accounting, or customer service, touches a technology system. They need to understand these systems to do their jobs well,” said Switzer. “We are also offering training on a variety of technology platforms that require employees to come up to speed.”

Next, I asked John to comment on how his cross-industry employer partners are equipping their workforces with applied technology skills. “Access to training and development is not the issue,” he responded. “It’s much more about how those skills are curated and aligned to arrive at actionable outcomes.”

Panelists shared that their organizations are searching for and using solutions that help their employees develop “soft skills” related to technology adoption such as critical thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving. “Applying knowledge of Big Data, digital infrastructure, and integrated processes is essential to effective decision-making,” said Aquilino. “Companies are infusing learning experiences with technology, so employees can leverage the familiarity of working with machines in their daily roles.”

For more panel insights, head over to the full piece at the DeVryWORKS website.

Why Employee Experience is the Future of HR

Starting in the last few years, culture has played a central role in a new focus on employee experience. Employee experience encapsulates what people encounter, observe or feel throughout their tenure at a given organization. The desire to create the most authentic, user-friendly experience has given rise to what is known as the consumerization of human resources. This is the process of creating a social and mobile interface for employees inside an organization, which serves as the entry-point for an immersive dive into the company’s culture and what employees experience every day. 

Driven by a more dynamic HR and c-suite involvement than most of us are used to seeing, this setup portrays the organization as quickly evolving with the needs of its workforce, and able to communicate in real-time where the company is, where it’s going, and how the individual employee fits in. Each employee accesses the experience via their own devices, all content is digital and available on demand, recommendations are customized due to input from analytics, and social interaction is prized and promoted.

Today and in the future, the notion of employee experience is complex and requires forethought, planning, and coordination between HR and the c-suite. Journey Mapping is a tool that got its start in the customer world. It imagines the employee experience across the entire talent lifecycle, and as an employee progresses through the Journey Map, they might go through stages like the following. Alongside each stage, let’s propose some activities a collaborative HR/executive team can undertake to influence and shape the experience.

Apply and Evaluate Stage:  How the candidate learned about the company; how they engaged with recruiters or hiring managers and learned sufficient information about the organization to make an educated decision.

Your experience must answer the candidate questions: What is this organization about and why would I want to work there? Is this the right organization and role for me? How can I be a part of what this company delivers its customers?

HR and Leader-Driven Activities:

• Target job boards, employee referrals, and internal career sites/social media platforms to attract top talent
• Convert top talent by telling a compelling story online and tuning candidates into company messages early
• Leverage mobile and one-click apply apps to simplify your process
• Create and deliver personalized messages for consistent touchpoints
• During conversations, provide insight into brand and talent goals
• Engage candidate in behavioral interviewing and assessments
• Provide access to a variety of sources, including current employees and supervisors
• Solicit and address feedback on the recruitment experience
• Provide a customized e-offer letter
• Upon acceptance, launch new hire onboarding experience

 

Join Stage: How the new hire was on boarded and assimilated into the organization.

Your experience must answer the employee questions: What can I expect here, and what’s expected of me? Where, how, and with whom should I work?

HR and Leader-Driven Activities:

• Deliver personalized content and solicit feedback on job location(s), schedule, and role
• Enable new hire to easily complete new hire paperwork
• Introduce new hire to team, mentors, and leaders
• Set job scope and performance expectations
• Connect individual goals to overarching strategic goals
• Survey new hire about experience and monitor performance

 

Learn Stage: Projects and training opportunities that facilitated integration into the organization.

Your experience must answer the employee question: What do I need to do right away to be productive and efficient at my job?

 

HR and Leader-Driven Activities:

 

• Serve up relevant content via a mobile-responsive interface at the right time in the right dose
• Recommend supplementary content to ensure continuous development
• Set mutually-agreed upon, short-term performance goals and provide interactive touchpoints to reinforce them
• Create an automated process to monitor completion and ensure compliance

Contribute and Grow Stage: How the organization fostered an environment of innovation and collaboration and provided opportunities for promotion and new responsibilities.

Your experience must answer the employee questions:  How can I make a difference here? How should I give and receive feedback? How can I further develop the skills necessary to drive my career forward?

HR and Leader-Driven Activities:

• Check in regularly to monitor progress, improve relationships, and recognize accomplishments
• Leverage ongoing reviews to identify skills gaps and create learning plans
• Adjust short-term goals to achieve long-term objectives
• Foster a culture of giving, requesting, and receiving feedback continuously
• Illuminate development paths, mentorship, and additional training opportunities
• Empower employees to take charge of their development and skill acquisition

What else can you do to foster a positive experience at these different stages of the employee lifecycle?

How to Implement a Forward-Thinking HR Initiative

Traditionally, the HR function has not been known for it. In fact, it’s typical for HR to be several years behind other industries – or areas of the same organization – when it comes to implementing new and more efficient ways of conducting business.

However, today’s HR leaders are working to change that.  Thanks to an infusion of younger and in many cases more agile workers into the profession, HR departments are leading the way in cutting-edge implementations that facilitate stronger employee experiences, better productivity, and longer retention.

Seek Relevance

If this sounds palatable to you, and you want to be the person who makes a difference in your organization, there are a few ways to go about it. The first is to understand that even the most forward-thinking initiative shouldn’t be developed in isolation. This means that you should first speak with your boss about the larger business and departmental goals you need to achieve, and where you should be focusing your attention to that effect. As you brainstorm, zero in on concepts that fall within this scope.

It’s also worthwhile to pay attention to the world around you. HR conferences like the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), HR Technology, Disrupt HR, and Work Human offer sessions to learn industry best practices as well as innovative new techniques for solving HR-related business problems. Every time I attend an event like this, I return energized and full of promising ideas.

Similarly, if you are part of a local HR community, reach out and learn what other organizations are doing. Visit other companies with similar challenges, attend networking events, and bring in expert speakers to get your team thinking about issues in a new way.

You can foster the birth of forward-thinking HR initiatives from within your own ranks too. Instead of relying on the same people all the time, seek out new blood. Invite skilled individuals from other departments to spend time in HR, and crowdsource ideas from your larger employee population through hackathons and MVP (minimum viable product) competitions to design HR-related products and services.

Leverage Technology

Many forward-thinking HR initiatives naturally involve technology, and the effective integration and use of people, processes, data, and devices in order to work strategically and effectively is an up-and-coming HR competency. At DeVryWORKS, we say that employees who can do this have applied technology skills, and recent research I conducted with DeVry University’s Career Advisory Board found that nearly half of HR and hiring managers believe there is an applied technology skills deficit in their current employee base.

One critical applied technology skill with particular relevance to HR is citizen development. According to Gartner’s IT Glossary, a citizen developer is a worker who creates new business applications using development environments sanctioned by IT. Over the last few years, most organizations have moved their HR systems into cloud platforms. These platforms are the perfect hosts for mobile apps and other tools that make it easier for employees to do their jobs and have a continuous, positive experience.  And now, you or members of your team can build applications without the programming expertise or coding experience that was mandatory previously.

That’s not to say that you’ll be instant experts. The key to developing a forward-thinking HR application that actually works is to engage with IT to understand the basic principles behind app design, and to use technology that has already been vetted and well-integrated with your company’s existing IT infrastructure.

For any technology-based initiative, you should establish a strong, ongoing partnership with IT. Meeting with that group regularly will allow your team to receive essential governance, guidelines, and best practices. Your initial effort will likely be most successful if the implementation is a pilot, meaning its scope is limited and it is launched with one business process or one team. Pilots are useful because they facilitate experimentation and continuous improvement with minimal disruption to the business.

Regardless of whether your planned project is a new application or a new employer brand, effective communication will make or break it. Make sure that at every step of the way, your employees are informed about proposed changes, that they understand how the initiative impacts their roles and responsibilities, and that they are encouraged to test and provide feedback. A team approach to innovation is the best approach to innovation!