Why educated talent alone won’t solve the skills gap Business News

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Today’s CEOs know that people are the most important factor in their organization’s success. The skills employees possess determine which companies innovate faster, respond better to customer needs and gain a competitive advantage. However, despite the huge amount of time and money that organizations invest in recruiting, they often still don’t have enough qualified talent to scale at the pace they need.

What forces are at play here? And how can leaders provide the most in-demand skills to succeed in today’s competitive landscape? To understand the root cause of the challenge, we must first distinguish between skilled talent and educated talent.

The education focuses more on theory, research and a love of learning. It does a wonderful job of preparing you for life and developing fundamental knowledge of the subjects. Whereas qualified talent is having the right skills to perform a specific role within an organization.

The two are very different because education was never meant to sync perfectly and perfectly with industry demand. For example, it may take a year or two to start an accredited program in college. In those two years, this industry could have made such progress that the knowledge of anyone who graduated from the program would already be obsolete.

In addition to the tight supply of “skilled talent”, there is also a growing demand for technology skills. This disconnect between supply and demand has resulted in a skills gap.

To close this gap, companies need to look beyond traditional recruiting and employ two additional workforce strategies:

Emerging Talent These programs create qualified candidates by recruiting potential candidates and then training them in the specific skills, tools, and industry knowledge needed for a position. Using a candidate’s potential as a reference results in greater equality: you expand your network, find talent where others don’t look, you help attract more people from diverse backgrounds. These include graduate programs, apprenticeships, and early career talent.

Requalification of employees

Solving the problem of supply and demand cannot be solved by hiring alone. The World Economic Forum estimates that, by 2025, 85 million jobs could be displaced by a shift in the division of labor between humans and machines, while 97 million new roles could emerge more suited to this new dynamic. It is a deficit of 12 million jobs that will have to be filled. There simply aren’t enough people to fill these “roles of tomorrow”.

Reskilling your workforce is a complementary strategy to hiring because it focuses on an entirely different pool of talent: your current employees. You release talent within your organization. Taking non-technical employees and requalifying them in technical roles, for example, retains a company’s organizational knowledge, business acumen, and culture and brings a diverse mindset to the IT function. Retraining initiatives include learning and development programs, job rotation, job enlargement and job enrichment. Another way is to share expertise within your organization through peer coaching and mentoring. Or you can provide expertise by hiring experts and specialists.

What emerging talent and retraining strategies have in common is that they focus on a person’s aptitude and learning capacity. They then provide the training they need to play a role. Essentially, they build your own qualified talent pools.

How can your organization gain a competitive edge by reskilling employees and bringing in trained emerging talent? With mthree’s industry-aligned training, from software development to data engineering to cybersecurity, you can take on the challenge from both sides.

Contact us to learn more about mthree’s emerging talent and reskilling solutions

Originally published on Business Reporter