Traditional Jobs Cannot Close the Widening Skills Gap

Skills gaps are an acute concern in today's rapidly evolving business landscape. The chasms in workforce skills are widening, as the need for staff accelerates more quickly than workers are gaining the skills and experience to fill them. In response to this challenge, organizations are increasingly adopting a blended workforce model, integrating full-time employees with freelancers and other external experts to meet the demand for certain skills.

Lack of technical expertise is particularly problematic as transformative AI-based tools create demand at an unprecedented pace. Competition is spiraling out of control for the most in-demand skills. Often the most challenging aspect of hiring is finding people with the right combination of technical know-how, such as AI prompt engineering or coding, and so-called soft skills, such as teamwork or people management.

Employer responses to the problem differ. Short-term approaches like better pay or increased perks do help but can result in bidding wars and high turnover as in-demand employees hop around opportunities. Longer-term approaches focus on retraining and identifying workers who can be reskilled to meet areas of demand. This too has its pros and cons. Workers are typically keen to upskill, yet matching employee profiles to in-demand work is not always apples-to-apples.

Are we really out of smart and talented people? Or are we looking in the wrong places?

Neither.

Traditional roles and static jobs are no longer enough. We need to fill skills gaps with skills. Instead of building a business on a collection of fixed positions, we need to focus on people with unique skills who tackle tasks and deliver outputs if we want to achieve business success, as outlined by Forrester in a recent report.

This will not be an overnight transition. There are key stages forward-thinking organizations need to work through to achieve this transition.

The first step is to unbundle jobs, breaking them down into modular components, goals, tasks, and outputs in partnership with HR and line managers, as most talent management structures are built around job descriptions. The result will be flexible opportunities for individuals to choose the work they prefer, via short-term projects and assignments that go beyond job titles and departments. By unpacking people from job descriptions, we recognize their full range of skills, experience, and interests. This approach treats individuals as more than just a job title, contributing to greater diversity, equity, and inclusion overall.

Global talent marketplaces help companies find new sources of talent for an updated skills-focused structure. More and more, businesses are relying on freelancers with unique, specialized skills to support their core employees—creating a blended workforce. Today’s freelancers are pioneers of new skills, technologies, and trends. They are constantly updating their knowledge and working on varied projects. Their high level of digital literacy allows businesses to easily plug them into workflows. It can take months to hire in-house candidates, particularly for high-demand skills, while productivity suffers due to unfilled gaps. Professional freelance marketplaces like Fiverr Pro allow companies to hire vetted talent remotely from anywhere in the world. By effectively managing both external workers and full-time employees, a company can ensure a continuous supply of the right skills to achieve goals.

Technology to support change internally is important too. Internal talent marketplaces (ITMs) and talent management stacks are essential for managing skills-based work. ITMs enable companies to quickly pinpoint capabilities needed and allocate the right talent in real-time. A talent management tech stack enables seamless integration of external experts into workflows. A Freelance Management System (FMS) like Fiverr Enterprise is critical, end-to-end software that provides control and visibility into the skills, management, payment, and compliance processes of a freelance workforce.

Gone are the days of rigidly defined job roles. We must now create organizational structures that cater to a constantly evolving world, where adaptability, innovation, and speed are key and people with valuable skills can achieve the more flexible approach to work they seek.