Skill Building

Companies are making a significant shift toward skill building.\

Skill building is more prevalent than it was prior to the pandemic, with organisations doing more skill building now than they did before the COVID-19 crisis.

The need to address skill gaps is more urgent than ever. Closing skill gaps in companies’ workforces has become a higher priority since the pandemic began. And of five key actions to close these gaps—hiring, contracting, redeploying, releasing, and building skills within the current workforce—skill building is more prevalent now than it was in the run-up to the pandemic. 
Redeploying talent to new roles—which often requires some degree of skill building—has also become more commonplace over the past year.

Commitment to skill building represents more than a one-time investment. Employers plan to increase their spending on learning and skill building over the next year.
Skill-building efforts are focusing on softer and advanced cognitive skills.

More than half of employers are focusing on developing leadership, critical-thinking, decision-making and project-management skills. Many of the skills employers are focusing on fall into two categories: social and emotional skills and advanced cognitive skills.

Getting skill transformations right: The recipe for success.

Even before the pandemic, employers recognised that skill gaps were a pressing and critical issue. Employers have begun a skill transformation to support employees’ skill building in a large-scale and programmatic way. For those that have, the benefits are clear. Skill transformations have a positive impact on four outcomes: the ability to realise company strategy, employees’ performance and satisfaction, and reputation as an employer. 

Despite the enthusiasm, the successful design and implementation of skill transformations is difficult to get right. This involves comparing the company’s current supply of skills with the demand for certain skills, based on its strategic ambition and overall business model.

Since skill building and redeployment are often the predominant actions that companies are taking, important decisions in this phase also includes which learning formats to use and how to design and deliver learning journeys to employees.  

This includes execution and delivery of skill-building efforts at scale, across the organisation: ensuring that the workforce is building new skills, that there are dedicated organisational structures in place for learning and that there is a rigorous yet dynamic system for tracking the impact of learning.

Larger companies tend to be most successful at three practices related to workforce planning and assessment: assessing demand and need for specific skills in the future, determining the current supply of skills, and analysing skill gaps. Smaller organisations are particularly good at workforce-planning practices, seemingly because they often benefit from greater transparency around the organisation’s needs, know their employees better, and can create a more accurate baseline of skills. Smaller organisations also see a higher success rate at skilling than their larger counterparts.

Companies appear to struggle most with the practices related to the infrastructure and delivery of skilling efforts. 

Many companies are now at a critical juncture when it comes to talent development and skill building in the future. To emerge stronger from the pandemic, now is the time for employers to invest in skill transformations and apply the lessons of the past year to crystallise their current and future skill needs. 

And when they do so, they should not fall into the trap of focusing only on “hard” technical skills for learning. The pandemic, has shown how critical leadership, interpersonal skills and resilience really are, and that they require different ways of learning to be cultivated.