Build Skills to Keep the Talent You Have and Attract and Grow the Talent You Need

Empowering people to reach their full potential in the workplace is the key to building a thriving organization.

Workers are enduring a slew of worries right now about their professional futures. With an uncertain financial landscape, layoffs, and reports on declining real wages, it's no wonder that the current labor market is creating significant uncertainty for workers.

Along with the pressures workers face from external factors, they also want more from their employers to help prepare them for what's ahead. A new study from Amazon and Workplace Intelligence reveals that an overwhelming 74 percent of Millennials and Gen Z employees may leave their jobs within the next year because of a lack of skills-development opportunities.

Also from that study, a significant number of employees, nearly 80 percent, expressed concerns about lacking the skills necessary to advance their careers, while more than half worried that their skills have grown stagnant since the onset of the pandemic. An alarming 70 percent said they felt unprepared for the future of work.

As workers grapple with the evolving job market, upskilling is not only a pressing concern but also a logical investment for organizations looking to retain talent who may be on the verge of quitting. Every organization needs to assess whether its workforce has the right skills and capabilities to achieve its business objectives. Here's how to do it.

Assessing skills and potential

The first step to any successful workforce assessment is to break down your business objectives into initiatives -- specific actions and projects that support your overall goals -- and then assess the people you'll need to deliver on those initiatives.

For example, if an organization's objective is to become the number-one digital bank in the world, some initiatives to achieve this goal could be to launch a mobile app, create a user-friendly website, implement new security measures, or stand out as a leader in the fintech space.

Once initiatives are identified, it's essential to assess the people you'll need based on their skills and potential to support those initiatives. Returning to the fintech startup scenario, if a company's initiative is to differentiate its brand by creating an intuitive interface, it's unlikely that everyone on the product team has all the skills they need to execute on that objective. However, these skills will be essential to getting the job done. To close the skills gap, the fintech startup should align and understand its business goals, and then identify the skills and capabilities it will need to do the work.

Overall, organizations should document what skills they need today, what skills their employees have and the ones they want to acquire, what skills they're training on, and, finally, what skills will be necessary to ensure future success for the organization in its industry. Organizational leaders should also know where these critical skills are located, and whether those people are in the right business group to properly execute on them.

Once an organization identifies the gaps that need to be filled, it can use skills adjacencies -- skills similar to ones it needs that it knows its people could easily learn -- to upskill and reskill their people.

The aforementioned fintech may have a product team working on the user-interface project and the leader may want to find someone who has worked on delivering product using "Agile delivery methodology," a top and rising skill. There might not be a product manager on the team with that skill, but the leader could look for adjacent skills and identify the best people to learn this new skill, based on what they already know and their potential to learn.

According to the Eightfold AI Talent Intelligence Platform, if a person knows Scrum, SDLC, or requirement analysis, they will be able to easily upskill themselves to Agile. Another bonus: Now that the product team knows it needs this top and rising skill, it can look for these adjacent skills when hiring, thus potentially increasing its talent pool fourfold.

Consider upskilling before hiring

Everyone knows this labor market is still tight -- and people with in-demand, top, and rising skills are hard to find.

Organizations should identify how they can get the skills they need through a variety of methods, including new hires, but especially by upskilling their current employees and bringing in contingent talent to fill the skills gaps.

Assess the trade-offs of each option. New employees with the needed skills might demand a higher salary, but will likely hit the ground running. Talent-acquisition professionals already know the pain of trying to fill high-in-demand roles with a small pool of external talent. In this case, engaging and promoting current employees could be a great option that benefits everyone -- investing in that employee's growth and development while bringing the skills you need to the organization.

Even looking outside the department for other employees with potential can help organizational leaders gain insights into various functions. The organization also benefits from those employees bringing their knowledge and expertise to their colleagues.

And, as always, organizations should consider the contingent workforce a key part of their workforce strategy. Even for short-term projects, there is a vast group of professionals out there ready to jump in with their skills to get the work done.

An organization that goes all-in on a skills-first strategy breaks down silos and encourages collaboration -- critical for retention and job satisfaction -- while encouraging innovation and creativity. This open and holistic approach that supports people realizing their potential is one of the best business strategies to retain that talent in the long term. And that just makes good business sense.

 

This article was written by Sania Khan from Inc. and was legally licensed through the Industry Dive Content Marketplace. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.