When skills become scarce and current development methods do not produce high-potential employees quickly enough, human resources specialists must transform themselves and their approach.
The data seem to contradict to each other —unemployment rates are high in most major markets around the world, yet employers are still having trouble finding workers who are trained for the jobs that are available. The need is particularly acute in skilled labour and professional positions; thus, organisations are struggling endlessly to find the skills and people they need.
In our part of the world, the impending arrival of the Asean Economic Community (AEC), the changing services mix, a demographic shift and an ageing workforce pose both an opportunity and a threat to the workforce. For a start, the supply of talent is expected to shrink as baby-boomers retire and birthrates decline in many countries.
Moreover, given today’s stormy business environment with ever more demanding customers, companies are racing to develop the most innovative products and services; as a result, they will need an ever more sophisticated and evolving skill sets. If they are lucky enough to be able to find those skills already available in their existing workforce, they will definitely gain and sustain a formidable business advantage. On the other hand, if the skills are scarce and are not easily tapped, there’s a high possibility that such organisations will fail and lose in this race.
When all these challenges are combined, organisations eventually will need to be equipped with a more diverse range of skills to improve efficiency, increase productivity and finally succeed amid faster-paced business competition.
Many surveys have shown that global CEOs are concerned that a key skills gap could limit their organisations’ growth prospects. So, the question is, what can we do to ensure that people are ready for the skilled jobs necessary to meet the realities of the current business environment? Or to be exact, what can HR professionals do to help close the skills gap?
Employers, educators, policymakers and consulting firms around the world have long recognised the critical importance of helping to develop the skills that people will need to compete for today's and tomorrow’s jobs, which in turn can transform lives and strengthen economies.
In my opinion, HR professionals are critical in helping to closing those skills gaps. To do so, they must be proactive, tapping the skills needed when and where organisations need them. In other words, this approach is similar to the “just-in-time” process that helps manufacturing companies manage risk, reduce costs and improve flexibility by delivering materials just when they are needed.
Likewise, a just-in-time workforce enables HR to manage risk related to potential workforce shortages and to instantly tap the skills organisations need. There are several practical ways to develop just-in-time workforce capability. These range from preparing people with various skills so they can handle tasks outside of their normal realm of responsibility, rotating jobs constantly on demand so that people can learn as much as possible in their areas of interest, and using data to analyse the workforce in figuring out how to obtain the needed skills.
Regardless of whatever approaches HR professionals intend to choose, they will need to weigh some critical factors, notably the cost and time required to learn new skills. This is necessary in order to determine whether traditional training is still able to deliver next-generation employees and leaders quickly enough to produce a return on investment.
The truth is that most of the time, employee development cannot simply be done through training which is a one-off educational event. Instead, it is far more effective to use “action learning” or a “flipping the classroom” method, which pulls together a group of high-potential employees to study and work on pressing topics relating to an actual assignment. You can also consider a “field learning integration project”, where you choose an actual on-the-job project to apply your new capabilities while being coached and supported by a team invested in your success.
All in all, experiential learning is a much better way to ensure that learned behaviours are understood and used, just as the ancient Chinese proverb reminds us: “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand”.
A shift in employee development can certainly help businesses focus on providing on-the-job learning programmes that engage workers and equip them with the knowledge and skills they need. Also, it is vital to help employees make learning new skills a component of their everyday work in order to achieve the utmost benefit.
Overall, the skills gap is and will be one of the most urgent trends in the year to come, and it will require a transformation in HR practices. The ability to develop just-in-time workforce capability can create a significant advantage, enabling organisations to pursue market opportunities and respond to changing customer needs faster than their competitors. HR can help in this regard by building a variety of ways to creatively tap the skills their organisations need, which will create flexibility that can help them outperform the competition.
In other words, HR will have to become firmly integrated into the business, shifting from the conventional development of extremely rigid and formal processes to something that is more supple and can tap essential skills when and where organisations need them.
----------------------
Arinya Talerngsri is Group Managing Director at APMGroup, Thailand’s leading Organisational and People Development Consultancy. For more information, write an e-mail to arinya_t@apm.co.th or visit www.apm.co.th