Contrary to the popular belief, there are numerous great and high-paying jobs out there in the market. However, the glitch lies in finding candidates with the right skill sets to do justice to these roles. Fast-paced market and technology advancements simply mean that employees should constantly upgrade themselves with new skills, which cannot be kept up by the grad school curriculum. For this reason, in many fields, particularly in specialized industries, there is a significant gap between the candidates available to fill the position and the skills required for doing justice to that particular role. According to a study by Deloitte, 70% of the organizations surveyed cited that ‘capability gaps’ top the list of their challenges.
What Exactly is the Skills Supply Chain?
The process of transforming the ‘raw materials’, in this case the under-qualified or the new employees, into high-performing resources by incorporating right, job-specific skill sets into them is known as skills supply chain management. Although the best solution can be hiring less-experienced professional and then investing in resources and time to train this professional, this is not very feasible, as it is a long game. However, the worst part is, there is no guarantee about the employee sticking around with the organization until he/she becomes completely productive. Therefore, the major challenge lies in helping your new employee gain all the necessary skills for performing the task as quickly as possible.
Where Exactly are the Training Investments Failing?
There is no doubt that training and development is the greatest weapon to fight the skill gap. Although employers are actively investing in several billion dollars in training, the major question is whether these billions are being spent wisely. Therefore, it is important to determine the factors that make successful employees. The study, ‘The Impact of Employee Engagement on Performance’ conducted by Harvard Business Review shows that, some of the top success metrics are Strong Executive Leadership (85%), Ability to Innovate (73%) as well as Effective Communications (86%). Therefore, the best way is to include measures to track the development of individual employees. This makes the training successful.
Renaissance of Corporate Training
Getting ‘Google first and ask questions later’ generation to memorize the training binders is absolutely pointless. Therefore, the new renaissance is content engagement and definitely not memorization. Besides, with the advent of online learning industry, professionals are turning to online subscriptions and cloud-based content. Therefore, the only way to make your professional training program a worthy investment is to engage your professionals and ensure that they implement the newly learned tactics in their routine work.
Synchronizing Leadership Training with the Rate of Change
Today, companies have completely embraced the flexibility offered by cloud-based tools for communicating and retaining the knowledge that is based on the proven models of effective learning. Besides, there are numerous mobile technologies that quickly allow the leadership to engage with partners are employees through content building. This creates a more efficient and highly specific skill-supply chain. However, this requires investing in cloud-based solutions. This helps the professionals in grabbing content, which tells them what they should be knowing at a particular moment. With the readily available mobile Learning and Development tools, professionals can quickly upgrade their knowledge and optimize their skills in extremely short span of time.