Why Educated Talent Alone Won’t Solve the Skills Gap
mthree is a Business Reporter client.
Today’s CEOs know that people are the most important factor in their organization’s success. The skills employees have determine which companies innovate faster, meet the needs of customers better and gain the competitive edge. However, despite the huge amount of time and money organizations invest in recruitment, they often still don’t have enough skilled talent to move at the pace they need to succeed.
What forces are at play here? And how can leaders bring in the most in-demand skills to succeed in today’s competitive landscape? To understand the root cause of the challenge, we first need to make the distinction between skilled talent and educated talent.
Education focuses more on theory, research and a love of learning. It does a tremendous job at getting people ready for life and builds a foundational knowledge of subjects. Skilled talent is about having the right skills to perform a specific role within an organization.
The two are very different because education was never meant to neatly and perfectly synchronize with whatever industry happens to demand. For example, it can take a year or two to launch an accredited program at a university, but in those two years, that industry could have made such progress that the knowledge of anyone graduating the program would already be obsolete.
On top of the restricted supply of skilled talent, there’s also a growing demand for tech skills. This disconnect between supply and demand has resulted in the skills gap. To bridge this gap, businesses must look beyond traditional recruitment and use two additional workforce strategies:
Emerging talent
These programs create skilled candidates by hiring for potential and then training them in the specific skills, tools and industry knowledge needed for a role. Using a candidate’s potential as a benchmark results in greater equality; businesses cast a wider net, finding talent where others don’t look, helping bring in more people from diverse backgrounds. These include graduate programs, apprenticeships and early-careers talent.
Employee reskilling
Solving the supply and demand issue cannot be met by hiring alone. By 2025, it’s estimated that 85 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labor between humans and machines, while 97 million new roles may emerge that are more adapted to this new dynamic; that’s a deficit of 12 million roles that will need to be filled. There simply are not yet enough skilled people to fulfil these roles of tomorrow.
Reskilling your workforce is a complementary strategy to hiring, as it focuses on a totally different pool of talent—your current employees—and you unleash the talent within your organization. Taking non-tech employees and reskilling them into tech roles, for example, retains a company’s organizational knowledge, business acumen and culture and brings a diverse mindset to the IT function. Reskilling initiatives include learning and development programs, job rotation, job enlargement and job enrichment. Another way is to share expertise within your organization is through peer coaching and mentoring, or you can bring in expertise by hiring experts and specialists.
What both emerging-talent and reskilling strategies have in common is that they focus on someone’s aptitude and ability to learn, and then provide the training they need to perform in a role. In essence, these strategies build your own pools of skilled talent.
How can your organization get the edge on the competition by reskilling employees and training emerging talent? With mthree’s industry-aligned training, from software development to data engineering to cybersecurity, you can meet both challenges.
— Industry view from mthree
Get in touch to hear about mthree’s emerging-talent and reskilling solutions.
This article originally appeared on Business Reporter. Image credit: iStock id1198082420
