Samir Hassan is the CEO of Knowtified that closes skills gaps using methodology and deep tech technologies.
By 2030, there is predicted to be a shortage of 85 million people in the global workforce. According to McKinsey, skills shortage is already present in 43% of firms, and another 44% anticipate one during the upcoming five years.
In my previous article, I explained what I believe is the missing piece for effective corporate training. Here, however, I would like to highlight why I see the skills gap still existing despite the plethora of training, tools and resources at most organizations.
The Six Stages Of The Training Cycle
In order to understand the problem, it can be helpful to first dissect the training cycle at an organizational level. Below I would like to examine each stage in the process including the challenges and possible solutions.
Stage One: Building And Mapping Competencies
Process: Define competencies for all employees based on their job profile, department and expertise level for the calendar year.
Challenges: Building and mapping competencies for potentially hundreds or thousands of employees based on their job roles and expertise levels can be complex and time-consuming. It is also quite susceptible to human error.
Solution: There are several tools available that can help you map employees’ competencies. When leveraging technology to help, however, remember that linking the tool to the courses your employees will take is key to a complete training cycle. Additionally, when looking for a solution to help, consider whether the platform will allow you to input approval workflows, individual competencies and courses, as this might help you more easily and accurately map them to your employees.
Stage Two: Assigning Courses
Process: Based on the competencies of the organization, learning courses are prepared, mapped and deployed to the employees. This stage should be inclusive of the theoretical assessments.
Challenges: I believe that only tracking training course completions is insufficient. Learning objectives need to be tracked too or else matching the outcome of courses to individual competencies becomes difficult.
Solution: Most learning systems primarily track course completions but do not specifically track the learning objectives that are associated with each course. You can fix this by linking the individual competencies to the course’s learning objectives in order to ensure that the outcomes of the courses align with the individual competencies and skills that are being measured.
Stage Three: Skills Benchmarking
Process: The most critical stage in the learning journey is when an employee is assessed to determine if they can understand and apply the learned objectives of the course to their job. This assessment ensures that the employee is able to transfer their new knowledge and skills to their work effectively.
Challenges: Organizations deploy certain methods to verify the skills of the employees such as assessments and on-the-job observations, but neither of these tend to be systematic or documented across the organization to scientifically support the skills benchmarking.
Solution: Making skills verification an integral part of the learning process is critical to business continuity. In my experience, theoretical assessments aren’t enough and their preparedness can only be verified after a stipulated time. Every skill requires a different time frame to be verified, hence you should prepare a plan based on your organizational strategy and do a skills verification after training to benchmark capabilities. After the course completion, on-the-job skill verification can help guarantee that your employees have learned and transferred the acquired skills to their jobs.
Stage Four: Results
Process: The main objective of this stage is to create reports that are based on the third stage of the training journey, which focuses on behavior rather than just course completion. It is essential to benchmark the skills of both individuals and groups in order to accurately measure their abilities and progress.
Challenges: Since reports are typically calculated based on course completions and not on job assessments, they do not represent the capabilities of employees. Despite the hours and effort you may have spent, there’s no way to know the skills gap.
Solution: By making a small change to the existing process and introducing skills verification after the training has concluded, you can ensure that every skill of employees is benchmarked as per your company standards. Skills gaps can then be identified. By following this process, reports can now exhibit capacity and capability indicators.
Stage Five: Matching The Outcome To The Competencies
Process: After the reports have been generated, it is important to attach them to the individual competencies so they can help employees grow their careers.
Challenges: This process requires a mammoth task of mapping competencies to the results and can require a lot of manpower, is prone to error and depends on line managers.
Solution: Prioritize reports that show outcomes. In other words, you want to make sure benchmarks are matched to the individual competencies. By following my suggested solutions in stage two and linking the courses to the competencies right at the beginning, you can gather outcomes and match them to competencies more easily.
Stage Six: ROIrocess: Calculating the ROI is critical to measure the training effectiveness, budget justifications and making data-driven decisions.
Challenges: Calculating ROI in relation to the cost benefits in the absence of clear skill benchmarks can make it difficult to justify your training efforts and their impact on the business profitability. Hence a lot of companies settle for ROE (return on expectation) instead of ROI (return on investment).
Solution: Efficient skills benchmarking for your employees can also help you measure ROI. Once the skills are benchmarked based on your organizational requirements, you can enter financial data such as training development cost, implementation cost, time cost and cost-benefit to derive monthly, quarterly and yearly ROI percentages.
By breaking down the six stages of the training cycle and addressing the challenges and solutions for each, organizations can more effectively benchmark employee skills and measure the ROI of their training efforts. Through the effective use of new technologies, you can ensure that your employees have the necessary competencies to succeed in their roles and help your organization meet its business objectives in the face of an anticipated global workforce shortage.
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