The reality of skills in today's organizations

Facing skill shortages and their causes

According to a recent Gartner report, building critical skills and competencies continues to top the list of priorities for 68% of HR leaders in 2021. The same study revealed that more than one-third of HR leaders are dealing with a lack of visibility and understanding of the current skill gaps.

It’s against this backdrop that organizations have previously had a tendency to look externally for the talent they needed, instead of turning first to internal mobility efforts and investing in the learning required to help their people acquire new skills. Large-scale learning programs have often not dove-tailed with internal mobility efforts, and the ‘quick fix’ of hiring the skills needs externally has tended to be favored.But when COVID-19 first hit, companies world-wide implemented hiring freezes. Though hiring has picked up again, the pandemic acted as a catalyst for change. HR and L&D managers are now coming back to placing the development of critical skills at the top of their focus list to make the most of the talent available internally, foster new engagement and retention, and help transform their operations.

Research by analyst firm Fosway, commissioned by Talentsoft , a Cegid Company, found that only 7% of organizations have a fully integrated approach to skills – linking attributes across the people experience.

How did we get here?
The driving forces

The pandemic impacted the skills' agenda for a whopping 97% of organizations. It made HR and business leaders aware of their organization’s skill gaps and highlighted the importance of developing new critical skills in the long term. Additionally, it accelerated efforts towards improving the skills agenda and placed more attention on talent mobility.However, organizations were facing skills shortages and learning inefficiencies well before the pandemic.

Has your approach to skills development changed in response to the pandemic?

No, we had already adapted our skills agenda before the pandemic.
No, we’re still waiting to make changes to our skills development plan.
Yes, we harnessed the new challenges to fuel the changes we had already planned.
Yes, we had to react and find new ways to thrive.

What COVID-19 did was act as a catalyst to accelerate 3 core drivers behind skills development:

The digitization of work: The Fourth Industrial Revolution is bringing new jobs and demands as it’s thought that more than 1 billion people will need to be reskilled by 2030.

Talent gaps: McKinsey & Company revealed in 2020 that 87% of leaders and managers are either experiencing or expecting to face talent gaps in the future. Specific industries like manufacturing are more likely to face talent shortages as their day-to-day activities are being automated.

The changing nature of work: The past two years have proven that we need to prepare and adapt to rapidly changing conditions. That’s where life-long training supported by employers can prevent talent gaps and help professionals keep up with new market demands.

Another duty leaders have is to learn how to match a professional’s current skill set with new roles and opportunities — even if this requires changing projects or adapting to work with AI-based tools.

The Ins and Outs of Work

The Reskilling Revolution Report

The Ins & Outs of Work is the HR and Future of Work podcast for everyone – for HR professionals who know their stuff, managers in organizations big and small or inquisitive employees who just have an interest in how the world of work is changing. In this episode, we interview David Perring, Director of Research at Fosway Group, about whether a reskilling revolution is really on the horizon.