Skills development: Why is it still so hard to get it right?
PwC reports that CEOs today expect more pressure to perform over the next three years due to technology, tariffs, and nearly every other megatrend affecting global business. Because of this, it’s critical that organizations are equipped with the skills to both address immediate gaps and prepare for what’s to come.
However, the learner-led approach hasn’t and won’t help companies close the skills gap. This approach typically relies on the learner selecting the training they want to take, either based on their own development aspirations or automated recommendations based on their gaps or interests.
But learner-led skills development almost always results in the employee choosing the skills that appeal to them, and not what the organization needs now or in the future—if they even pursue optional training at all. We’ve done it this way for so long because intentional skills development is a big job, and letting learners lead the way was easy.
The key to driving meaningful results is by actively shaping the skills profile that your organization needs to succeed – now and in the future. Skills strategies should be informed by the business, by talent acquisition, and by learning and development. And it’s not easy, and no one solution or company is going to solve every aspect of it. But you can get started and make a big difference.
In this guide, you’ll discover the five steps to get started with an organization-led strategy throughout the process.
Step 1: List critical and missing skills needed
The first step in strategic skills development is to identify the skills your organization will need in the future. Mapping skills from a comprehensive skills ontology to your existing job codes will give you a starting point.
Innovations in AI, coupled with a robust skills library, can do this job-skills mapping for you, providing your team with a list of skills to consider. You may not get an exact list of what you need, but it’s easier to work from a draft than a blank page.
Once you have this list, work with other decision makers, such as talent acquisition and people leaders, to identify which skills are critical or missing for the near- and long-term. Have them do the following:
People Managers: Offer them the chance to suggest additions or deletions to the list. Ask them to also indicate which are the critical skills they need on their team, so you know what will be essential to your organization going forward.
Business Planning: Based on company evolution and growth, identify which new jobs are needed so they can be included in the skills mapping exercise.
Talent Acquisition: Because of their role, this team usually knows what are the hardest skills to hire for are. Ask them to identify these skills on your list so you have a better understanding of what you may need to cultivate internally, rather than trying to bring in through new hires.
Step 2: Prioritize the skills to train for
In resource-constrained environments, the reality is that you won’t be able to offer quality training for every single skill. This means you need to prioritize.
Leveraging your list of critical, missing, and hard-to-hire skills, create a priority list to focus your L&D efforts (and budget) on. Your prioritized skills list should be well-balanced to cover as much ground as possible. Some skills may be evergreen, like leadership and critical thinking, but some will be more topical like data analysis and AI literacy. Your list should also be a mix of soft skills, such as communication and teamwork, and hard skills, such as 3D printing and AWS.
Once you’ve got your prioritized list, review it with your executive team, people leaders, and HR teams to confirm that you’ve got the correct skills.
Step 3: Source training material
Getting the right training material into your LMS will depend mainly on the skills you need to train for, and you’ll want an LMS that allows you to work with a variety of prepackaged training content, as well as allowing you to create your own on the fly.
There are a lot of great content providers of soft skills, such as leadership, time management, and data analysis. More niche players can support training for hard skills and industry-specific skills. eLearning offers a lot of flexibility, but for those skills that require practice, working with live instructors, either via video conferencing or an in-person classroom, can be worth the investment. It costs more per student, yes, but since this is a top priority skill, doing it right is worth it.
Finally, you can leverage your in-house experts to create courses. Whether they partner with a curriculum designer to create something formal or you give them a channel on which to share their insight, or a combination of the two, this can be the best way to get going while reserving budget for the essential (but pricey) courses.
Step 4: Identify who needs training
One of the biggest challenges in a skills strategy is not identifying what skills a person should have, but what skills they already have. You can infer skills from their job histories, but it can be a mistake to assume that because they hold job A and skill Z is associated with it, that they have that skill, particularly if the scope of Job A has changed over time.
Skills-gap analyses have typically relied on self-reporting by the user to indicate their possession of the skills associated with their job. There are two big drawbacks to doing this. The first, of course, is the accuracy of that self-assessment. But the second is getting them to actually do the assessment, especially if there’s a long list of skills associated with their jobs.
But if you’re comfortable with identifying the gaps on an as-needed basis, your best bet is to push out training around your targeted, critical skills and give known cohorts who have those skills a clear avenue to show whether or not they possess them.
For example, you could infer that managers have leadership skills, but we all know that’s not always the case. If you have management training that needs to go out, you can choose to roll it out to first-time managers, notifying both them and their leader of the process to opt out.
For hard skills, you could have people who have these skills either submit their credentials or complete a knowledge test up front. If they pass, then you can update their skills information so they don’t get targeted again
Organization-led skills training hinges on taking a proactive approach to matching the right skills to the right learners. There are several ways to do this:
Approach 1: Push training to everyone with the skill
If you want to make sure that everyone with that skill on their job gets trained up, then go ahead and assign training across the board. This is definitely casting the widest net and could get expensive if you’re paying for training by user, but if you employ the self-reporting and test out options described in the Skills-gap analysis callout, it can be a good way to get people to accurately self-assess.
Approach 2: Mapping to where skills are most needed
You may have skills on your list that are critical to the organization—but only for select jobs, departments, or regions. For example, data analysis may be a nice-to-have skill for a bank teller, but mission-critical for a cybersecurity analyst at the same institution.
Approach 3: New skills introduction
If a skill is new to your organization, you may not have it on any job profiles and therefore, have no skills gap to target. While this sounds like it will be harder to figure out who needs the training, you can tackle it by looking at where that skill would make the most sense for a job, department, or location. For example, the technological skill needed to use chatbots could be useful for marketing and customer service roles.
Approach 4: Skills adjacency
Sometimes building on an existing skill is also a good way to target a group. It may be useful for a maintainer on the factory floor with data analysis skills to learn machine learning so they’re better able to implement predictive maintenance practices.
Using a combination of all these approaches is a great way to build a list of learners for all the critical skills your organization will need.
Step 5: Assign the training and create accountability
The best way to execute on your organization-led strategic skills strategy is to assign training to learners rather than relying on them to opt into the courses for your critical skills. But this isn’t just as simple as putting them into the course and waiting for them to finish. Too often, work takes priority over learning.
If senior leadership agrees that upskilling is a priority, then it can’t be allowed to fall by the wayside. You need to create accountability at both the individual and manager level to ensure training isn’t just completed, but the skill is actually acquired.
This means working with the manager to ensure that they’re creating an environment that supports, encourages, and most importantly, makes time for employee learning. Managers should be helping employees prioritize their skills training within their normal workload—or even modifying their workload in order to help them complete critical training. You simply can’t expect people to cram learning on top of a full work week.
It may also be helpful to embed skills training into overall performance goals. Employees’ annual performance should be evaluated on the training they completed, while managers should also be evaluated based on their ability to support that training and whether or not it’s completed. It should be part of their goal to shape an upskilled workforce.
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Conclusion
Our world is changing quickly, and learning is the key to not just keeping up but thriving. Create a plan for your strategic skills development, lead the way, and watch the future take shape.
