Top 6 Ways to Close the Skills Gap Through Training, Awareness, and More

WHAT INDUSTRIES STRUGGLE WITH SKILLS GAPS?

Luckily, you’re not alone. There are many fields that are struggling with skills gaps in certain areas of the country right now, including:

• Technology
• Manufacturing
• Welding
• STEM
• Communications
• Finance and business
• Healthcare

HOW DO YOU CLOSE THE SKILLS GAPS?

Some steps to closing skills gaps include:

1. Performing a skills gaps analysis in order to confirm what you already know, as well as catch other skills gaps early (some Economic Development Councils [EDCs] can help with this)
2. Analyze what skills you may need in the future
3. Decide on a strategy for addressing the skills gaps
4. Look at current progress and repeat

For some skills gaps, simply investing in marketing your industry better will result in more students choosing that field. Your company might also want to investigate whether the compensation they offer is comparable to other companies in their industry.

However, one of the best ways to try and address skills gaps is training. In a world where continuous learning throughout a career is expected anyways, it’s worth considering investing training for new *and* current employees to get great candidates to the level that’s ideal for your company.

Here are some strategy ideas for using training to close the skills gap.

RAISE AWARENESS OF YOUR INDUSTRY

Sometimes a skills gap is simply a marketing issue. The reality is that many, many jobs are available that young people are not even aware of because they’re not in the usual roster of primary jobs they hear about as children. But you can fix that.

• Partner with local colleges and trade schools to sponsor students
• Show up at trade shows, employments fairs, and college job fairs to reach out to students and job seekers. It might even be worth offering a certain amount of free training to the prospects you meet.
• Partner with local workforce boards. Sometimes certain certifications require on the job training – you can offer to let the OTJ training happen at your workplace.
• Organize with local high schools to have a field trip to your workplace.
• Market training and upskilling programs to existing employees.

CREATE AN ONBOARDING PROGRAM

In an industry with skills gaps, an onboarding program may be key to prepping new candidates for their roles. The onboarding program may be especially successful if it can adapt to prior candidate knowledge. Certain new hires might be able to skip a few days of training.

Onboarding can also create excitement for the company and set expectations for the learning culture for your company. This will prepare employees for what will follow and help foster the culture you desire. It can also reduce turnover by letting employees know you care about their career growth.

CREATE A CONTINUOUS LEARNING/SUCCESSION PROGRAM

Instead of hiring fresh, untrained candidates, consider training those you already have. If you implement continuous training at your company, entry-level employees will be able to move up to more skilled roles when they open up.

This is a great option for companies experiencing a shortage of candidates for roles that require a few years of hands-on experience.

An internal continuous learning program is also more likely to be responsive to the ever-changing needs of the industry than outside institutions and can be more organization-specific as well. Continuous training can be more cost-effective than waiting to retrain employees at the critical point. Case in point, AT&T ended up investing a billion dollars in retraining an entire half of its 250,000 person workforce in order to stay current with the market. The alternative was to replace that half with more qualified candidates, which would’ve cost even more. Continuous training would have significantly reduced that billion-dollar investment.