As employees and organizations adapt to mixed work practices, emerging technologies, and affected businesses, the skills required in today's workplace are changing rapidly. Gartner's analysis of more than 7.5 million job offerings shows that job opportunities in IT, finance and sales positions in the U.S. required an average of 17 skills in 2018. Today, the same type of job requires an average of 21 skills, including at least 8 previously unsolicited content. Meanwhile, the average 29 percent of the skills needed for jobs in 2018 could be lost in the next year.
This phenomenon poses significant challenges for organizations, especially in today's world of companies dealing with talent wars, where organizations are struggling to find ways to keep up with changing trends. Recruitment strategies alone cannot meet this demand, so organizations must find or develop new skills within their existing workforces.
To better understand how organizations manage changing skill needs, we surveyed 6,500 employees and 75 HR leaders. Unless otherwise noted, our findings are all derived from these surveys in 2020. The analysis shows that most organizations use one of the following methods.
Reactively. Unfortunately, many organizations find themselves reacting passively, scrambling to learn new skills as the need arises. A human resource manager at a large manufacturing plant shared the challenges of trying to keep up with the company's new skills development needs: "When we developed a learning program, the business was already making new progress. "In organizations that take a reactive approach, employees are using only 54 percent of their new skills after a year. At a time when demand is most urgent, these organizations are too slow to transfer skills to employees.
Anticipate skills needs. On the other hand, more than 50% of HR leaders believe that the solution should be to anticipate the future skills needs of enterprises and make them pre-emptive. However, there is a good chance that this attempt at prediction will lead to an investment in useless training or obsolete skills. Our research found that trying to predict skills is worse than reactive response: In organizations that adopt a skills prediction approach, employees apply only 37 percent of the new skills they learn on the job, significantly lower than reactive responses.
In addition to the above two methods, our study gives a third option: dynamic culture. This strategy views skills management as a vague, dynamic exercise, accepting imperfect existence and giving human resources, managers, and employees the freedom to react quickly to what they know and predict. In the current work environment, employees are always looking for greater transparency and personalization of choices, and dynamic ways give them more information so they can make the right choices, acquire the skills they need, and develop career plans that keep pace with the times. In companies that adopt a dynamic approach to skills development, employees apply new skills at work at 75 percent, twice as many as employees apply skills in skill prediction.
Here are three steps that can help businesses take a dynamic approach to developing or reinventing employee skills.
Discover changing skill needs
Most organizations today rely on managers to discover requirements and hr departments to provide solutions. When leaders realize that employees lack the necessary skills, they subconsciously assume that HR can provide training. Specifically, more than 75 per cent of HR leaders said that skills in each department were primarily the responsibility of the internal heads of the skills learning and development sub-departments. However, managers outside of HR are not necessarily clear about the talent positioning of business goals, which can lead to misjudgment of missing skills or neglect of important needs.
To identify and fill skills gaps as they arise, organizations can regularly bring together employee, leader, and customer feedback by setting up networks of stakeholders everywhere who can report on specific skills needs. Combined with efforts from all sides, these skill sensing networks can monitor changing needs and ensure employee readiness.
For example, London-based financial services firm, Gartner's client, and lloyds Banking Group have taken this interactive approach to planning skills needs. HR is responsible for driving collaboration within a network of skilled stakeholders, including business leaders, partners in each business unit, and HR experts. This collaboration not only helps them quickly identify skills gaps, but also uncovers actions taken locally and across the business to fill them. Stakeholders meet regularly to assess skill lists that contain information about employees' existing skills and talent intervention information that is planned to meet the needs of business skills. They review the progress of established intervention plans and focus on changes in skills strategies that may affect the entire business. In this way, Lloyds can make data-driven decisions that meet local and bank-wide skills needs.
Jump-start skills development programs
Many institutions respond to rapidly changing skill needs by increasing the frequency of formal training. Unfortunately, a 2018 Survey of Skills Changes conducted by Gartner on more than 7,000 employees worldwide showed that the amount of time employees spent in formal virtual or classroom training didn't have much to do with the proportion of skills actually used. While well-organized formal training is still effective, it is too slow for many pressing skills. A common problem is that the needs have changed when it comes to organizing planning and conducting training.
These rapidly changing skill requirements require faster solutions, what Gartner calls "skill accelerators." Skill Accelerator leverages existing resources and expertise to enable skill upgrade support in a way that is "sufficient" to meet skill needs in a timely manner. Developing effective solutions in a timely manner is better than being late for perfect training. In practice, you can do this:
Discover similar skills for employees. Create shortcuts to high-demand skills by discovering similar springboard skills among employees' existing skills.
Train "skill communicators" to mentor colleagues. Skills upgrade some motivated and influential employees, and when the need arises, they can mentor other colleagues.
Impart knowledge when employees need it most. When business needs arise, leverage data to discover and adapt knowledge transfer.
Finding similar skills helps business leaders tap into a broader and more diverse pool of talent, who are often able to get into the groove quickly. For example, an organization may need to master Python employees, and in addition to targeted hiring or searching for professionals within the enterprise, recruiters should also consider candidates with relevant skills, such as Linux, Java, or Perl. Having one of these skills often makes it easier for employees to upgrade their skills, even through self-directed or on-the-job learning in the target area.
We interviewed a large processing company that, in taking this approach, thought extensively about the background of their existing employees and identified the people most likely to gain data science skills. Rather than competing for experienced data scientists, the agency invests in developing employees with backgrounds in similar disciplines, such as mathematics, statistics and business analytics.
Another way to accelerate skills is to provide training to employees at the right time. After realizing the time difference between the training period and the application period, CVS Health, one of Gartner's customers and a medical company with a CVS retail chain, focused on unifying training with employee and business demand periods. HR leaders are aware that it is difficult for leaders to fully adequately or timely identify when new skills and training are most needed by businesses. As a result, companies use data from multiple sources to identify when employees need to use new skills, and to maximize the benefits of training such as during career-critical periods and promotions.
Increase transparency between employees and organizations
The key to dynamic skills development is to ensure that the organization and employees are moving towards the same goal. While many leaders and managers try to motivate employees to continue learning by developing learning mindsets, most employees are not lacking in motivation. In fact, 97 percent of employees say they're willing to learn new skills whenever the company gives them the opportunity. However, only 39 percent of employees believe organizations are taking effective steps to help them understand how skills needs information can be applied to their environment.
To help employees make informed decisions about their own development, leaders need to share information about changing skill needs — and when uncertainty exists — and how those changes may affect specific responsibilities. Employees should also share their skills and career goals with the business. This exchange enables employees and leaders to exchange information and seize mutually beneficial and flexible development opportunities together.
As industries, organizations, customer needs, and work practices continue to change, the need for rapid rebranding and upgrading of skills will only grow. These challenges require organizations to rethink how they can fill skills gaps with existing solutions and adopt a dynamic approach to skills development that allows employees to maximize the skills they learn in their current roles, rather than anticipating the future or waiting for executives to give instructions to develop new skills.
Sari Wilde, Alison Smith, and Sara Clark | wen
Sarri Wilder is Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Gartner Consulting, where he leads a global team focused on creating research and products to improve human capital output. Surrey's areas of focus include leadership and manager effectiveness, learning and development, employee experience, and diversity, equity and inclusion. Alison Smith is Senior Research Director of Human Resources at Gartner Consulting. She currently focuses on conducting research and advising clients on current trends in the development of key skills and competencies in the workforce. Since joining Gartner in 2006, Alison has managed projects spanning most areas of human resources, including learning and development, recruitment, total compensation and talent management. Sarah Clark is the Senior Research Lead for Human Resources at Gartner Consulting. She works with chief human resources officers, heads of learning and development, and heads of talent management to identify and share emerging best practices in areas such as blended work model design, learning design and delivery, and skills-based talent planning.
Feng Feng | Translated by Liu Jun | School Sun Yan | edit
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