Top tips for bridging your skills gaps

The difficulties of skills gaps are felt far and wide across many industries at the moment and with this costing the economy around £63bn a year in lost income (BBC), it is not something we can ignore. We speak to organisations across the UK who feel some of the aches and pains of this cumbersome issue, yet we have supported them to soothe, and in some cases remove, these aches and pains. When struggling with not having the skills you need in your business, or not having talent coming through to fill more senior positions, there are a few things that I would urge you to consider:

• Recruiting on values – ultimately, if you recruit graduates who share your values and beliefs and are a good cultural fit, you can teach them the specific, technical skills they need for the role. Understanding an individual’s attitude and behaviour is a really important part of the recruitment process.
• Developing the skills that are lacking – what training and development do your graduates need? Is it technical training, ‘softer’ skills, a combination of both? Support them where support is needed and you may be able to narrow the skills gap you’re experiencing. Graduates know that they are always 100% prepared for making the jump from academia to employment. The good thing is they are driven to make the transition quickly and effectively, for their own benefit as well as their employer’s.That’s why Training & Development is rated the most important factor for graduates searching for a job (EY Survey, 2015).
• Creating your future leaders – achieve two aims at once by developing your graduates in line with a) the skills you need them to have for your business to thrive and b) in line with the roles you want them be taking in two, three, five years’ time.

This is absolutely what we mean by ‘growing your own talent’; developing your employees in a way that achieves the short, medium and long term goals of the business whilst providing the graduate with a vision of their progression, the skills they need to achieve success in their role and suitable development opportunities that will get them to where they need to be.

If organisations can make these considerations, we will go some way to plugging some of the skills gap issues that are so prevalent in the business world today.

If you would like to have an informal chat about any of the above, or any of the information found on our website, please do give us a call.