We are in a constant workforce transformation – the industries are changing, the technologies are evolving rapidly, new types of jobs appears over night and new skills are required to achieve our business plans. Unfortunately, keeping our internal and external talent with these dynamic skillsets is a real challenge for most organisations.
As the World Economic Forum mentioned in their 2020 Report about Future of Jobs, companies estimate that around 40% of workers will require re-skilling of six months or less and 94% of business leaders report that they expect employees to pick up new skills on the job, a sharp uptake from 65% in 2018.
And this is not all. A Korn Ferry study includes a sweeping country-by-country analysis and the biggest issue isn’t that robots are taking all the jobs – it’s that there aren’t enough humans to take them. The study finds that by 2030 there will be a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people (equivalent to the population of Germany), resulting in about about 8,5 trillion in unrealized annual revenues.
There are, simply put, too many variables working in this social cog that we’ve stumbled upon, from decades-long increasingly lower birthrates to the rise of digitalization and IoT. Not to mention that talent shortage, left unmanaged, could become responsible for slowing our technological evolution.
The talent shortage may be hard to see now, even though signs have already appeared taking in consideration the relentless challenges of recruiting by means of time and costs. Since talent shortage has become a real threat, a report done by McKinsey shows us that organizations identify skill gaps in a wide range of business areas, but predominantly data analytics followed by IT.
But it’s not all bad. Companies are starting to do a great job developing employees’ skills through e-learning platforms, interactive courses, coaching, assignments and activities to develop a continuous learning culture. And this is a great thing because each company needs to invest in its employees to help them evolve and keep up with the rapid changes.
However, this might not be enough to close the skill gap between talent supply and demand, it impacts only a limited number of employees. Hiring seems the most commonly reported tactic for most organizations in all regions, but it’s more and more difficult and it takes time and effort to hire the great limited candidates who are also hunted by many other companies.
Filling The Gap
More than levelling up our hiring strategies and building a desirable recruitment process for the candidates, companies have to take over the responsibility of training and developing the current and next wave of talent.
There are a lot of people looking for jobs who have valuable skills, but not the right mix of skills that the company needs at that moment in time. Most of the companies are still looking for that ‘perfect’ candidate. But that ‘perfect’ candidate either doesn’t exist or is too hard and expensive to be hired.
Currently, only 2% of the applications are qualified for the job they applied for which left us with thousands of inactive candidate databases that we’ve paid for, but not capitalizing at all.
We preach for “Don’t decline YET”. Redirect to up-skilling or other open roles. Offer them access to learning materials, help them learn about the technologies that you are using, specific business concepts or skills that are important for your company. Many of the learning materials already exist in the company, and should be employed in the training and up-skilling of future employees. It’s important that more companies have learning environments that are accessible to everyone.
That’s why we’ve devoted ourselves to help companies to close the gap between talent supply and demand by providing a deployed digital playground where you can add courses and learning materials and make them accessible to the rejected candidates and external eager learners.
Imagine your company career site having a gamified environment filled with open courses, assessments and even a shop with gifts for rewarding talent proactivity, learnability and referrals. This system allows our partners to test people’s learnability and build sustainable up-skilled pipelines in an automated manner. Also, they are a great way to emerge candidates faster in the company culture & values.
In conclusion, talent shortage is a serious problem and upskilling the workforce is everyones’ job right now. We need to get involved in this change and create strategic impact.
For more details, feel free to book a demo! We have some great stories to tell.
