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The reality of skills in today's organizations

Facing skill shortages and their causes

According to a recent Gartner report, in 2022, 84% of HR leaders said it is important to equip managers with new skills.

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.With all the changes, companies world-wide implemented hiring freezes. 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 Cegid, 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

These past two years 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 that.

Has your approach to skills development changed ?

No, we had already adapted our skills agendac.
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 2021 and 2022 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 thattwo out of five employees in our global sample said they are considering leaving their jobs in the next three to six months.

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.