Investing in today's workforce to meet current and future skills needs is no easy task. It needs conducting to ensure the right skills are prioritised at the right time with the right support from leadership.
With ever-changing economic winds, businesses are using intelligent skills and learning platforms to uncover, label, and develop every colleague's skill but may lose sight of the “So what” when defining return. To understand return they must consider how leaders are controlling business commitments from 12 months ago with emerging priorities that signal a skills switch to for instance user experience, Ai, and digital literacy. If the skills plan is unable to gauge what skills really matter to the customer and business, then it can lead to delays in the colleague journey along with confusing announcements, poor performing timetables, and disjointed journeys.
Mapping the train tracks of the present and knowing where to build them in the future can be daunting, as it is about understanding the critical tasks colleagues are being asked to do now and soon. It is then about controlling skills trains that have left the station to deliver on those service tasks, speeding them up, or diverting colleagues to skills test tracks that demand different work activities. Creating accessible and scalable skilling opportunities to support applied practice, requires aligning skills learning to tooling and active support to boost confidence and noticeable productivity. Building tracks while running skills trains on them requires checking your signals are working across the tracks such as gap closure. Knowing when and how to build, buy or borrow skills from 3rd parties can keep the network moving over the gaps, however ensuring internal skills building is not stifled by the latter two is key to building colleague creative thinking and adaptability. Understanding what speed to go at requires planning across HR along with business leader ownership.
Asking every colleague to get on the fast skills train is not always practical, as the application of that skill may not be realised instantly and thus undervalued. However, leaving parts of the workforce behind is not viable either, so raising awareness and setting colleagues off on a skills train covering essential digital skills enables them to grasp the basic concepts and language that other colleagues further down the trainline are experiencing with rewarding destinations.
Bringing these colleague experiences to life every day requires continuous strategic monitoring, leaders’ role modelling, mapping skills gaps, understanding colleague churn, and actively formulating and communicating an employee value proposition to engage, retain, and attract colleagues. Communication should not be intermittent, distorted, or untimely, so colleagues can start to appreciate what choices they have ahead of them including skills trains that are going to be out of service sooner.
These trains may no longer meet increasing customer demands and so need changed or upgraded to tracks that operate automated technology to produce greater speed, effectiveness, and reliability. As a result, sunsetting them takes timely, coordinated change management and engagement with the opportunity for colleagues to change between or before destinations. Creating a compelling story of change requires testing messages with colleague focus groups and articulating how applying new skills will effectively lead to the moments that matter for the customer. Bringing this to life through customers stories and early skill adopters guiding colleagues through exhibits of the future is helpful in driving the right line manager and team conversations, so colleagues can seek the truths when planning their growth.
So, for those in the early days of mapping journeys, assessing, and scheduling skill trains, take the time to step back and look at what is happening across the business, strategic and customer priority network. Understand the current and arising service needs of your customers such as the cost impact of service delays to put weight behind the need to act. Determine then what skills trains will not reliably get the business to their service destination and what new skills trains need building, testing, and advertising, to ensure the workforce has the chance to develop on the one that is most relevant and meaningful to them and the customer.
