Tackling the corporate “skills” challenge

There are two different, but related, issues that require addressing when tackling the so-called “skills shortage” and “skills challenge”.

The first area is addressing the skill and experience level of people currently within an organisation; and the second area is meeting the capacity or demand for people with a specific skill set and experience level.


Skill and experience

This is the easy part and subsequently most organisations focus the majority of their effort on solving this problem. Organisations improve the skill and experience level of their resources through training interventions and providing the right project/work experience. It is worth noting that it is far more difficult to do the latter (project/work experience) as it requires organisations to take a slightly longer-term view of their workforce requirements.

Resources can be up-skilled and cross-skilled and this is certainly a viable strategy as it allows resources to move into new areas, which creates a gap at the lower skill area that is easier to fill. This is akin to succession planning although it is managed at a group level and not an individual level.

Capacity

Understanding the capacity problem starts with understanding what the gap is and will be. This gap is the result of what the organisation anticipates they will need per major skill/profession area (to meet current and future demand) versus what the organisation currently has at its disposal. Thereafter it is necessary to apply a workforce strategy to determine what percentage of this gap should be permanently hired versus contractors and partners.

The strategy for closing this gap should include defensive (retention) and recruitment/attraction approaches. From my perspective, the most effective retention strategies are those that focus on career and profession development. This is supplemented by meeting hygiene requirements (salary, benefits) and very importantly providing a “sense of belonging”/community involvement.

The other element of addressing capacity requirements is recruitment (in conjunction with securing contractor and partner agreements for that aspect of the workforce). However, if hypothesis is true, and there is a shortage of adequately skilled resources in the market, then we need to tackle this differently as it is not cost effective to over-pay for candidates - at least not as a general rule.

Transformation

This is where it gets really interesting as the only option is to actively transform the current and potential workforce. Let’s looks at both of those elements.

Transforming the current workforce means growing your existing resources to create capacity at the bottom of the career ladder and recruiting/training junior people to fill the gap. I believe that this is the long-term intention of our government as it is through this type of transformation that we will provide the country with the professionals it requires to be globally competitive.

Transforming the potential workforce is far more difficult. Corporates and other professional organisations work closely with tertiary education organisations to ensure that the workforce of tomorrow is adequately trained and employable. However, the tertiary education organisations themselves have to work closely with secondary and primary education organisations to ensure that they have an adequate pool of candidates to train for employment by the pubic and private sector.

This means that the supply chain extends to primary schools and as such it is important to support and actively participate in education programmes at every level within our country or region that we operate.