Solving The Skills Shortage: 7 Things L&D Can Do | Podcast

By 2030, we'll need to reskill ONE BILLION people (Adecco).

That skills shortage is a big challenge, but it can be done 🙌

We asked four experts how to tackle it in practice on The L&D Drop-In and here are seven of the best things we learned about taking on the talent shortage (just below the full episode).

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1. Not solving the skills shortage is a risk for everyone! That’s why we have to act now…

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Nelson explained how we’re living through exponential change, which introduces lots of uncertainties and opportunities.

“The organisations who can get the skills to be able to seize those opportunities and navigate those uncertainties fast enough win. And the ones who can't get those skills fast enough, lose.” - Nelson Sivalingam.

The question is, what does losing too like?

“They struggle to compete, they lose their best talent, often they go bust. And so why is that a concern?

“Well, right now, the availability of those skills that you need to win is quite low on the market. Because change is coming about so much. There are very few people with the skills that we need to get those jobs done.” - Nelson Sivalingam.

If organisations can’t develop those skills and skilled workers in house, they lose.

If people aren’t building the skills to stay relevant, there’s a risk that they could become socially and economically irrelevant.

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2. That creates pressure for L&D to be aligned with the business.

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“It's really key for us in the learning and development team when budgets are getting tighter and when teams are getting smaller to prove that we’re supporting the organisation to reach its objectives, rather than setting our own objectives.

“We need to be speaking their language. We need to be supporting them and really integrated as part of the business for the organisation to be reaching those goals.” - Joelle Tomkinson.

Building on that point, Nelson explained the power this can have in aligning everyone around skills development.

“We’re now tracking the metric that the business understands, right? Let's look at the individual parts of the business. The employee doesn't really care how many pieces of content they've done… 

“Whereas if we go towards a skills-based approach, the employee and the C-Suite get this. If you go to an employee and say, you don't have skills X, Y, Z to do the job well or to progress in your career, they get that. If you go to the C suite and say, actually, we don't have the skills to achieve these OKRs  or these business goals, they get that too.”

That is why we have to move away from content-driven L&D to a skills-first approach, if we’re going to solve our skills crisis.

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3. Business documents and strategies are a great starting point.

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“We need to be asking the business, going to departments - even if it's just a conversation to understand what it is. But asking for documents as well.

“Getting the business strategy documents and using that to map out what is required, what skills are going to be required and asking individual teams what their objectives are.”

Knowing this, whenever people approach us around learning, we can ensure we’re aligning to the business strategy and the skills needed to make it work.

It will also allow us to focus on quick wins and long-term value, because we recognise the immediate skills needs and what’s needed in the future.

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4. If you want to start closing skills gaps, break it down into 3 simple questions

What skills should this person have? And based on the tasks that they're going to do, what is the required proficiency level?

“First, we need to really think about that skills architecture. Sometimes the misconception is we directly connect jobs to skills, right? But actually, it's not the job that's connected to the skill, it's the tasks that you do as a part of that job role that are connected to skills.” - Nelson Sivalingam.

This is really critical to driving talent mobility! If we’re going to redeploy and reskill people, we need to look at the tasks they're doing and the skills required to do those tasks, not looking at is as: this job role has this skill.

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Now we need to know, where are they in regards to those skills?

This is where skills measurement and skills are crucial, and Nelson believes this is the best approach.

“We really recommend a 360-approach to skills measurement because the best people to evidence whether you're applying a skill in your day to day context are the people I work with.

“My manager, my colleagues who see my work - they see my performance and they can see if I’m applying this skill within a relevant context or not.” - Nelson Sivalingam.

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We know where you are and where your gaps are - how do we bridge them?

If you think you can throw a course library at this problem, you’re wrong. Because people are learning from a wider ecosystem, so the question is how we bring that together AND ensure it speaks our skills language.

“This is the problem with having such a diverse ecosystem. They all have their own taxonomies and frameworks, which isn't useful for you.

“If you've got a bunch of different providers and they're all speaking a completely different skills language, how are you going to align it back to your skills gap?

“How are you going to build the impact narrative to say that your learning has helped develop the skills that you need, right? You need your ecosystem to speak the same language as your organisation.”

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HowNow AI was built to solve this problem! Create a single skills taxonomy across your ecosystem, and you can learn more about it here. 

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5. Skill measurement, mapping and building is a journey, start small

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“Technology can help you drive skills forward, but that’s the enablement layer. In my opinion, the strategy above has got to be defined first, but the key to it is really finding a starting point.” - James Griffin.

We should aim for progress and not perfection, and that means an initial phase of experimentation.

“Find stakeholders that genuinely have a problem you think skills can solve and go after that. Iterate after that, learn, and scale.

“It'll be overwhelming. It'll be terrifying. So just start somewhere where you think you've got a higher chance of success, good stakeholder engagement, good relationships and maybe better sets of data integrity and veracity.”

Nick shared some similar advice on starting with job tasks for one skill:

“See if you can map the job tasks for one skill. Go and ask your leaders, Hey, what are the 16 job tasks of business development?

“I would yeah just really recommend trying to do that for a really simple skill to see how you go in your organisation and I reckon that could be quite an insightful journey for you.” - Nick Petch.

If you’re in customer-centered business, Nick recommends going for the skill closest to the customer.

6. Job tasks change faster than skills, so build skills based on those tasks

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“Is it even possible to have a skill that does not correlate to job tasks in an organisation?

That is, are you even able to practise that skill? Are you even able to truly measure that skill? Is there any skill imperative of a skill that doesn't correlate to job tasks.” - Nick Petch

This is such a great point! If we’re not building skills attached to job tasks, can we really measure it? And will it really have an organisational value?

“Based on my key research, it seems as though job tasks are changing faster than skills. So should we be focusing on skills or should we be focusing on job tasks?

“One of the key approaches we've been taking is kind of not worrying about the skills and starting with the job tasks and using those job tasks to actually form the skills.” - Nick Petch
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7. The right culture is needed to build skills, here’s how you measure that

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“I think back to this principle that learning has more to do with relationships than it does to do with content.

“And so we really need to be thinking about creating the right kind of environment that actually induces or amplifies rather than dampens the right types of interactions at scale.” - Nick Petch.

The trouble, as Nick points out, is that culture can’t be measured tangibly, but we can start measuring the narrative. 

Nick shared an example of surveying people around their experiences relating to DEI in the culture.

“Through those stories, we'll be able to potentially categorise them into stories we ideally want to hear more of and stories we want to hear less of…

“This little cluster of stories over here, we're going to circle that, and that's going to be our first small probable measurable experiment. We might design skills and change the environment, change relationships… let that run, put it in the oven, come back, and re-measure those narratives to see if they’ve changed.”

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