Forging the future-proof workforce
Against a backdrop of major global upheaval and unprecedented change in the workplace, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the type of aptitudes and abilities people are seeking out is changing. In tandem with this, there’s an apparent move away from more task-orientated skills, such as time management, towards more people-orientated skills instead. Indeed, recent research by LinkedIn helped to identify the top five soft skills predicted to be particularly in demand during 2021.So, a quick quiz: how many of these do you think you can guess (we’ll confirm them for you further below)?
This development hints at just how important it is to look ahead and ensure the health and long-term success of your business: in essence, to future-proof your workforce. Invariably, it comes back to the people and making sure that you’re supporting individuals, nurturing talent and navigating as a team through the usual terrain and uncertainty alike. Closing any skills gaps that your employees might have, to enable the business to grow and prosper, is a crucial part of achieving those aims.
To help you explore and plan a learning strategy that will see your organisation keep pace in changing times, let’s first identify some of the key factors behind the importance of future-proofing your talent.
1. Leadership and management
From leading people individually to wider business management, the ability to support teams through change, address health and wellbeing concerns, deliver training and coaching, and disseminate top-down information will be crucial, so the figures who’ll manage your strategic change are vital to its success.
2. Determining the right workforce strategy
Considerations such as appropriate skills, inclusivity and technology are key here, and it’s clear that strategies have changed in the last year, as they had to given recent events.
3. Staying competitive
With those events ongoing, many businesses have had to move into different spaces and have new competitors as a result. Understanding new competitive landscapes will help with the identification of the key skills staff need to stay ahead.
4. Attracting and retaining talent
With that in mind, keeping your most valuable asset – your people – intact is hugely important. The cost of hiring new staff is put at approximately £3,000 per person, so good planning in this area needs to be part of your strategic business case.
5. Upskilling individuals and workforces
Staying ahead means staying adequately skilled, so ensuring your staff are equipped with the right knowledge and competencies is crucial, for example, in compliance with new laws (Brexit, anyone?)
The case for future-proofing your company
Let’s turn to why organisations need to fuel their forward-thinking. Research has found that a big concern among senior executives is a failure to adapt to digital transformation, a situation brought to light recently via the many video call mishaps that have gone viral. Having a good awareness of the hazards and cyber-risks that emerge when moving operations towards the digital world is also important, especially around the protection of business and customer data. Another consideration is that the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the issue, making everyone accelerate their plans in this area (with varied success). Yet statistics confirm that significant skills gaps remain within the digital arena. For example, 99% of companies engaged in digital transformation report significant skills gaps, so closing those could be all-important when it comes to facilitating transformation (and giving you a competitive edge).
External influences account for a range of additional factors that underscore the importance of future-proofing your firm. So much so that we came up with an acronym – PESTEC – to cover them, which you can see more about below. Suffice to say that whether it’s the change of government in America, transformed relations with the EU, revolutions in social and shopping habits, technological advances or environmental pressures, there is a glut of new and emerging developments that make your capacity to keep pace crucial.
Spotting and navigating skills gaps
Understanding where your skills gaps actually lie and how to fill them is an often ignored but invaluable undertaking. For example, research has found that highly transferable core skills such as communication, teamworking and problem-solving are still really high on businesses’ agendas. As you might expect, skills like leadership and management, and creative and design thinking remain a high priority too. Surprisingly though, hard skills like cloud computing, engineering and coding, and mobile computing and development are considered low priority. But given the shelf life of a technical skill tends to be less than five years, whereas soft skills can be a lifetime asset, it makes sense for businesses to be investing in these more durable and transferable talents.
A recent survey commissioned to identify the skills most in-demand during the pandemic found answers such as resilience, empathy, initiative-taking and adaptability in the top ten. This suggests a shift towards a greater appreciation of agile thinking and leadership. It also indicates a move away from more task-orientated skills in favour of the softer skills mentioned at the head of this article. So, what are the top five in-demand soft skills predicted for 2021? They’re creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability and emotional intelligence. How did you get on with your prediction?
What these suggest is the growing significance of skills that ally around people-centricity: the generation of original ideas and solutions; the ability to convince others to support your ideas or to act in some way; the capacity to work within a successful team and unlock synergies towards common goals; the power to operate effectively during uncertainty; and being able to effectively understand and modulate emotions.
Take steps to stay ahead
How do you feel your business stacks up and how can you stay ahead? Well, when planning for the future, there are typically two areas that are neglected when running new initiatives or training plans. Firstly, there are pre-initiative considerations which include: diagnostics and needs analysis; senior manager sponsorship; effective communications; and the understanding of business objectives. Then, when your scheme has run its course, there are post-initiative factors to address, which include: equipping line managers to see people through change; refreshers and reinforcement; helping people to ask the right questions, and embedding change through coaching and feedback.
Of course, there’s the actual learning initiative itself and our top tips for that can be summarised as follows:
- Make it social – if we learn something, we’ll share it, which spreads the message and creates advocacy
- Make it mobile – whatever your device or location, training doesn’t need to mean sitting at a computer
- Make it shareable – with today’s technologies and trends, learning should be passed on with ease
- Make it personal – tailor it to your situation, your sector and your people
Finally, whether it be microlearning, eLearning, factsheets, workbooks, virtual classrooms, webinars, apps, podcasts – or a clever combination of all of these, or something else besides – Access eLearning can help with whatever you need to ensure your people don’t just survive, but they thrive in the years ahead.
