How You Can Identify and Close Workforce Gaps

HR managers face new difficulties regularly with an evolving workforce, new technologies, and expanding markets. Disparities between the company, HR, and employees are frequently the source of these difficulties. 

Today's workplaces frequently experience these workforce gaps, but some common strategies exist to fix them.

 

Consider the Workforce Gaps

These three gaps have emerged due to several prevalent trends in the workforce and economy, and most businesses are affected by at least one.

 

1. The Skill Gap

The workforce skills gap refers to the gap between the skills organisations believe they have or require and the skills they really have or can obtain. This disparity has grown in recent years and can be caused by various factors.

Unrealistic expectations can also contribute to workforce skill gaps. Many companies are so focused on cutting expenses that they can convince themselves that their current skills are adequate, even if this is not the case.

Individual skill gaps can emerge when an employee's skills do not match the role's needs. This could be due to changes in employee responsibilities, a poor performance evaluation suggesting they're coming up short of what the position requires, or new skills needed for a promotion or upcoming project.

Skills gaps at the company level are typically detected when a company fails to meet their objectives. Skills gaps in this area might also result from a strategy change or new technologies.

 

How to Bridge the Skills Gap in the Workforce

Conduct a skills gap analysis by examining your existing capabilities and skills and determining what skills you will require in the future. The ability to quickly and effortlessly recognise your best employees and filter your staff based on the skills they have or want to acquire is a crucial first step in closing your workforce skills gap.

You must then be able to identify the talents you require right now to analyse your existing skill gap. Consider what your organisation values and what your people need to do well in their jobs.

Finally, you can consider recruiting or training to fill your skills. The particular skill gap challenge will determine the best solution.

You must put in place a solid succession plan to minimise skills gaps in the future.

 

2. The Engagement Gap

A more recent difficulty facing HR practitioners today is engagement. One cannot emphasise the importance of employee engagement and experience. The present workforce engagement gap is causing low employee morale, poor teamwork, low creativity, and staff attrition.

 

How to Bridge the Workforce Engagement Gap

Producing a superior experience does not happen instantly, and there are many ways to address it, from recruitment to retirement. Here are some pointers to get you started.

• Correctly utilise the correct data. 

  • Mix traditional transactional HR data, such as how many employees leave, how many prospects accept offers, and so on, with human factor data, such as beliefs, emotions, and intentions, which tell you why rather than what. 

  • Collecting employee input and delving further into essential indicators based on this qualitative data will help you rapidly and efficiently improve your employee experience instead of relying on guessing.

• Prioritise people.

  • Make individuals and experiences a part of your company's fundamental values and beliefs. Communicate these principles to managers, teams, and employees in everything you do. Giving managers options to communicate with staff and personalising their experience leads to a people-first culture.

 

3. The Knowledge Gap

Last but not least, the workforce learning gap refers to how managers and employees perceive the importance of training and learning compared to how effectively it is being provided.

Employees opt to stay with an organisation for various reasons, including training and career growth, and many base their selections on which company provides the best learning and development.

 

How to Bridge the Learning Gap

To bridge the workforce learning gap, you must rethink the learning experience from your employees' perspective and offer a new engaging learning approach.

• Curated educational content.

  • Employees nowadays learn from many sources, including TED Talks, podcasts, and much more. 

  • Suppose your learning experience does not give this knowledge in a single location. In that case, you are not providing the experience that your employees desired, and once they go elsewhere to acquire it, you will be missing a significant piece of the puzzle. 

  • By providing this curated content in one place, you can keep track of the learning path in the future, allowing you to optimise your content better and spend your resources on producing the learning content that fits best.

• Customise the experience.

  • Develop personalised learning paths based on a department's, team's, or individual employee's needs and goals. 

  • HR software can now assist you in creating a dedicated learning portable for staff that includes content from across the web, not only internally generated courses. 

  • You may then assign recommended courses or training based on team or employee goals and even empower managers to suggest employee-specific content swiftly.

 

Based on the industry and organisation, there could be countless workforce gaps in your HR. The crucial thing would be to have the data and tools to discover trends and expose workforce gaps and the resources and capabilities to remedy them when the time comes.

 

Source: Talenteam