Address and overcome skill gaps between your employees
A talent gap is where an employee’s current abilities don’t match those best suited for their job.
Having talent gaps in your organisation can stunt the day-to-day running of your business and can hinder your employees’ ability to grow and develop.
A huge 70% of employees have reported that they don’t have mastery of the skills needed to do their jobs.
In order to stay ahead in a competitive industry, businesses must take on the responsibility of identifying any talent gaps and elevating the skills of their employees.
Here is how to bridge talent gaps in your team.
Conduct analysis
Each role within your organisation will require a specific set of skills. In order to establish where your talent gaps lie, you must first conduct analysis to identify any issues.
This can be accomplished through performance appraisals: speaking to your employees and working through their achievements and goals. It can also be accomplished by looking at the way your business functions. For example, are there new processes that employees are struggling to grasp? Or are employee’s unable to keep up with new technologies?
Once you’ve conducted an analysis and identified where the talent gaps lie within your team, you can start to take proactive steps and work with your staff to overcome them.
Re-evaluate your hiring process
If you identify a plethora of talent gaps in your team, you should take some time to re-evaluate your hiring process. Your recruitment team should be aware of the important skills that candidates need to fit a job opening.
Ideal candidates should also be able to prove their skills during specific tests. The inclusion of a strict criteria combined with skill-based quizzes will allow your recruitment team to easily find the right person for your business, thus reducing the likelihood of talent gaps.
Train your employees
One of the easiest ways to bridge talent gaps in your team is to train your employees. As 63% of employers are willing to hire someone with transferrable skills and train them, employing someone who you can mould will allow you to develop staff with skills bespoke to your business.
For existing staff, perhaps you can bestow them with extra responsibilities, such as training them to approve time off requests. Not only will this elevate their skills—and your business by extension—but it will also increase morale and improve employee retention.
Training videos, online courses, and workshops will motivate your team and boost their skills. Your efforts will be rewarded with a skilled and loyal team who will continue to drive your business forward.
Offer incentives and support
Upskilling your team to bridge talent gaps in your business can be challenging. Therefore, it’s important to keep your team’s spirits up with incentives and support.
Offering recognition and reward-based schemes will motivate your staff to hit learning targets and keep them focused. Supporting your employees along the way, be it with mentors or with an online notice board, will help them to not be discouraged by talent gaps but to view them as an opportunity for progression and growth.
In turn, by offering incentives and support, your staff will be driven to bridge talent gaps, elevate their job skills, and feel both confident and positive along the way.
Share knowledge
To improve your talent gaps, or to help bridge the talent gaps of other departments and organisations, you should be unafraid to freely share knowledge.
To share knowledge, you can set up training sessions, collaborate with other companies, or send employees to a different department or region to view the alternative ways a division can run.
In doing so, you’ll be able to borrow and share knowledge and ideas and utilise them to upskill your staff, enhance your policies and procedures, and overall improve your business.
Have a business that thrives on a challenge
Bridging talent gaps can be challenging for any business. However, with thoughtful planning, closing these skill gaps can be achieved with ease and positivity.
By identifying where your talent gaps lie, improving your hiring process, and taking the time to care for and upskill your employees, you can have a business that thrives on a challenge and overcomes it with communication, teamwork, and loyalty.