The number of skills required for a job increases by 10 per cent year-on-year.
This is according to Gartner, a research and advisory company, the skills required for a single job increases by 10 per cent every year and found that employees are only applying 54 per cent of new skills they learn to their roles.
It also stated that the disruptions brought on by COVID-19 have amplified the need for new skills and that 33 per cent of skills needed three years ago are no longer relevant.
Gartner’s 2020 Shifting Skills Survey for HR Executives show that 60 per cent of HR reveals that their CEOs put pressure on them to ensure their employees have the skills they need in the future. Three years, ago the same survey found that 69 per cent of HR executives report pressure from their employees to provide development opportunities.
The research firm advises businesses to provide a dynamic skills approach as this helps HR sense shifting skills needs in real-time.
Leveraging a dynamic skills approach enables HR to do three critical things:
- Sense shifting skills in real-time. A dynamic skills approach anticipates skill shifts as they are occurring—rather than predicting the future—and adapts to those shifts in an iterative, course-corrective way. To sense shifting skills, organisations can facilitate cross-organisational networks of stakeholders that are sensitive to, and empowered to, address skills as they shift in real-time.
- Develop skills at the time of need. This approach goes beyond the realm of traditional learning and development (L&D) tactics, such as classroom training or curated e-learning libraries. To develop skills at the time of need, organisations are able to identify and implement skill accelerators — strategies HR can adapt by leveraging existing resources (e.g., content, people, skill adjacencies) to develop new skills solutions at speed.
- Employees make skills decisions dynamically. Dynamic skills approach calls for two-way skills transparency between the organization (e.g., what skills it needs, what skills it no longer needs, where it’s needs are unknown) and the employee (e.g., current skills and interests). HR is then able to create channels for employees and the organization to exchange skills information, which facilitates a better match between employees and their organisation to pursue mutually beneficial and flexible skills development.
Sari Wilde, managing vice president in the Gartner HR practice said:
While the majority of organisations are utilising a reactive approach to skills building that doesn’t work, most are still striving to be more predictive to get ahead of skill shifts. The problem is that a predictive approach predicated on HR identifying a specific skill set need for the future also fails.
Organisations that embrace a dynamic approach to developing skills find that employees are both learning the right skills and extracting the value from those skills in a way they do not within the reactive and predictive approaches. The result is that employees apply 75 per cent of the new skills they learn.
Darius is the editor of HRreview. He has previously worked as a finance reporter for the Daily Express. He studied his journalism masters at Press Association Training and graduated from the University of York with a degree in History.
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