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Closing these skills gaps can also ensure that companies aren’t losing money over a lack of adequate training and team building. For example, a lack of skilled employees could create a 8.5 trillion dollar deficit in revenue over the next decade. On top of this, only 34% of workers feel supported by their company’s skills training opportunities, and up to 46% of companies have no strategic plan to address these gaps.
Closing skills gaps in the workforce can be as simple as investing in training opportunities to address team needs. By investing early on, companies can mitigate the risks of having an unskilled team. Let’s talk about the root cause of skill gaps, creating an action plan to close those gaps, and how to train and track improvement to make sure the investment is profitable.
Hard Skills Versus Soft Skills
When considering training opportunities, the first thing to understand is which skill you’re trying to develop. There are two different categories of skills that are necessary for a team to work effectively together: hard skills and soft skills.
There are a few key differences between the two types. For one, hard skills are measurable, while soft skills aren’t quantifiable. There’s no real metric to use in measuring soft skills. They’re more something that you see and experience rather than something you can measure. Another way to think about soft skills is that they’re internal skills with external results. Things like integrity, open-mindedness, creativity, and teamwork, while not necessarily always visible, soft skills are crucial in helping teams work well together.
In contrast, hard skills involve technical knowledge that requires specific training and experience gained in life or education. Things like being multilingual, networking capabilities, and data analysis are examples of hard skills. Experience with different software is also a hard skill that can be seen and tracked for its usefulness.
In order to be part of a team and to use these skills effectively, it’s important to know that not every team member needs to be qualified with every hard skill. This is where skill gaps can meet in the middle, and each member will pull their own weight with the technical knowledge that they individually have. However, every team member must have well-developed soft skills to make the team last. For instance, having a team full of open-minded, creative members with effective problem-solving skills is more valuable in collaborative settings than each person knowing the fastest way to create an Excel Spreadsheet when only one or two people with that skill will suffice.
Training Opportunities that Match the Goal Outcome
When trying to create or find a training opportunity, it’s important to understand which skills you’re trying to develop. For instance, training for hard skills needs to have a system in place that helps track the learning outcomes of that specific program, whereas the soft skills are a little harder to see. Oftentimes, training opportunities enable a person to practice both soft skills and hard skills at the same time. For instance, you can have formal and informal training opportunities that enable team members to learn how to handle stressful situations with an emphasis on endurance, while the initial training desire was to learn how to properly create a client-requested proposal.
While we look at the root cause of skill gaps, we’ll also discuss how to determine the right training opportunity.
The Root Cause of Skills Gaps
There are several reasons that skills gaps remain a continuous problem in the workforce.
- Employee turnover, for any reason, creates gaps by taking away employees who’ve worked in a specific job, gaining experience in the niche, and being part of a team. Whether large numbers of employees are retiring or moving on to jobs that fit them better, creating space for newer and inexperienced employees opens a natural gap where none had previously been.
- Lack of adequate training in soft skills creates gaps where none should be. In reference to an earlier statistic, only 34% of workers feel that their training opportunities have adequately prepared them for job responsibilities and collaboration.
- Improperly listed job advertisements or dishonest applicants cause a gap that can otherwise be avoided by ensuring that job listings have been created with the best and most accurate descriptions possible. Using the interview process well can make sure that each applicant either comes equipped with the necessary skills or that they possess the qualities that the employer knows can be easily trained on and can also mitigate the risks involved.
By identifying the root cause of a specific skill gap, you’ll be able to determine the factor that has led to the gap in the first place and know where to place the necessary training program to develop better skills. By running a root cause analysis, you’ll find the quantifiable information that will lead to improvement in team dynamics. An effective root cause analysis will:
- Clearly define the problem
- Establish the causal relationship between the root cause and the problem
- Delineate the known dynamics of the causal relationship and how they combine to create the problem
- And clearly present the evidence-based conclusion that supports the identified cause’s existence
Creating an Action Plan with Tips to Close the Skill Gaps
There are several ways to help close these skills gaps, and these include:
- Determining the demand for skills needed
- Developing soft skills like collaboration, critical thinking, business basics, and other useful skills that make a person more team-minded
- Creating tailored learning plans for specific roles within the team
- Offer variety in the learning format to enable team members to choose what format works best for them.
- Use a learning management platform that enables the accessible tracking of learning outcomes to determine effectiveness
- Track progress and development after the fact
An action plan will give you a quantifiable goal to track in order to determine a specific route’s effectiveness. Each individual training method has its own benefits and drawbacks, and narrowing down the right one for your team is crucial in making it work for you.
The Importance of Measurement
While training opportunities are an excellent way to begin closing skills gaps, they don’t do much more than a baseline training scenario. In order to get the most out of a training program, it’s important to measure the effectiveness to make sure that goals are being met; the goal in this scenario is a closed skill gap.
Measuring the effectiveness of a training program gives us quantifiable data to determine if specific targets are being met. It allows companies to take action as early as possible and make adjustments in the program or process before going too far. Without tracking, they’ll realize too late that the program isn’t nearly as effective as they thought.
Qualities of a metric that produces results are:
- A baseline of knowledge that’s quantifiable or trackable
- Targets that can be measured at regular intervals
- And it must align towards a goal
Teams work best together when collaboration is met with highly efficient and knowledgeable members, people who work well together and can find a good middle ground in their hard skills with overlapping soft skills. Despite this knowledge of effective teamwork, some companies lack what’s necessary to move forward toward their goals. It’s only by identifying the places in which they lack and creating definitive goals to reach within their team training opportunities that they find success. Developing and taking advantage of programs designed to provide workers with the necessary skills to work effectively as a team enables them to reach their goals as a company.
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