As technology grows and businesses adapt to new workplace modules and methods, it’s important to keep your employees updated. With this rapid change, many organizations are facing skill and knowledge gaps that are affecting their businesses badly. Many organizations have been facing this skill gap issue for a while now and it is only set to grow in the next few years because of the rapid advancements in Technology.
It became very important for organizations to address these skill gaps. Most organizations, if they can afford, offer employee training with relevant courses and hands-on training to make the employees more competent. Organizations that have a lesser budget for training are offering online training with the help of learning management systems like Convergence Training that offer subscriptions at minimal prices. Some organizations lay off staff and hire new talent to cover up the skill gaps. But to do all this, how would you know if the employee is lacking a particular skill? To make it easier for you, we have listed down a few points that could help you identify the skill gaps.
1) Start with your company’s goals:
To identify the gaps in your organization, you should be very clear about your goals and objectives. Identify what skills you need your employees to possess which can be helpful shortly. For instance, if your HR team is handling most of their work on paper and doing it manually, ensure they are skilled to use the software to automate most of the tasks. Likewise, in every department look for the changes and make your team ready for them.
2) Analyze your current workflow:
You need to analyze the current workflow to know about the skill gaps of your employees. Try to figure out where the quality of work lacks and how you can bridge that gap. You can re-skill and train your employees to fit your needs and make them more competent. The other way to do this is, you can hire new people in particular if you feel your current employees cannot perform to your expectations.
3) Find out the KPIs:
KPIs are nothing but key performance indicators which help to identify what is going right and what’s not. Different types of KPIs are required to access different aspects of the business. If you can identify the KPIs of your business, you can easily gauge the performance of the organization as a whole. With these metrics, you can find out skill gaps and do what’s needed to address them.
4) Conduct employee assessments:
The other easy way to identify skill gaps is to assess your employees. Through quizzes, tests, and role-plays you can evaluate the performance of an employee. You can also base your assessments on real work scenarios so you can find the skill gaps in the practical environment. Once you find the skill gaps, all you need to do is rectify them.
5) Take feedback:
Feedbacks and reviews are excellent ways to find out where it is going wrong. Even though you miss out on a few things, feedback will help you find them. Ensure you get the responses regarding performance issues of your employees. Feedback should include all the employees, managers, and sometimes customers too. You can also conduct surveys because it is an easy way to get feedback.
6) Gather all the data:
Gather all the data about the skills your employees are lacking, what type of training they require, is there a need to hire more people, current employees who can be promoted, skills needed for the future, and much more. This will give you an overall analysis of where you stand and how you can take the organization forward from there.
Conclusion:
To warp up, skill gaps are common in every industry especially with automation and software tools popping up in the market. The digital world requires the employees to adapt to certain new skills so that they would be better equipped to perform their duty. We hope this article helps you in identifying the skill gaps in your organization and addressing the issue quickly before it’s too late.