When we look back at the 2020s, what epithet will the decade have earned? The Decade of Disruption? Perhaps. Last year’s Future of Jobs Report from the World Economic Forum estimated that 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next five years. Almost half of the things we do at work – the skills we’ve honed and developed – will be strongly affected, and perhaps fundamentally changed, by our evolving world.
Perhaps the Decade of Uncertainty makes more sense. After all, workers have spent years building up their knowledge and experience in the expectation that the job market will value them. To find out that you’re suddenly in the employment equivalent of negative equity is a terrifying thought. And for employers, there’s the anxiety of realising that your five-year or ten-year plan may not be fit for purpose because you simply don’t have the skills in the building to make it happen. And yes, we can always hire new people with the requisite skills – the problem with that is that baby boomers are retiring, and people are having fewer children. Workers will be scarcer and cost more. If you want to hire the right skills, get ready to pay.
But employers have expectations too. The vast majority – 94% – expect employees to pick up new skills on the job. Upskilling is expected, in the broad sense that you place new hires in a new context, surrounded by new people, and they’ll start to absorb knowledge and capability by osmosis. But is this putative upskilling something that employers expect to just happen? Is it an organisational priority, or something that is assumed to go on behind the scenes? Most importantly of all, which skills are being learned? Are they the skills we need to fulfil the company’s needs, now and in the future? What exactly are we building towards, and who is best placed to drive skills growth, measure its impact and effectiveness and demonstrate value and ROI?
Creating a skills-based task force
If we accept the findings of the World Economic Forum – and many other organisations have published similar findings in recent years – then skills, surely, are a strategic imperative irrespective of your sector, size or revenue. Who, then, owns skills? Whose job is it to identify the skills we need, put the structures in place to ensure that those skills are brought into the business and then measure their effect?
The obvious answer is L&D, and yet L&D’s stock as a contributor to organisational success can ebb and flow. Consider this: 75% of people managers said they were dissatisfied with their company’s L&D efforts. “Dissatisfied” covers a lot of ground, but the underlying point here is that training is not, generally, seen as critical to business outcomes. Two of the biggest problems are encapsulated in this one sentence: firstly, that learning is not directly applicable to (or linked to) the skills the business needs to excel; and secondly, that this is coming from the people most able to see, on a day-to-day business, how teams are (and should be) performing. People managers are the conduit through which skills growth is delivered to the organisation. They see the effects of new and developed skills; they deploy those skills to deliver on their own objectives; and they’re responsible for communicating that to leadership. They may not be directly responsible for the drive to promote skills growth, but they’re at the coalface for how those skills affect revenue. And yes, it’s an oft-repeated trope that line managers are just too busy to take on more responsibilities, but there’s nothing new about this to take on. Managers (should) have regular performance conversations with their team. They see, and discuss, the reality of how those team members are performing. If a line manager doesn’t have a clear idea of what skills his team has and hasn’t got, surely that’s an inexcusable gap in their knowledge.
Now is a good time to bring leadership into this conversation. Do senior executives own skills? If they’re not driving the demand for skills growth, who is? On paper, leaders may recognise that skills are the fuel driving their company forward. But we need to be more clear-headed about the skills we’re missing, and more granular about how we address that. Committing to a serious skills gap analysis – which is not the long-winded, time-consuming process that it was ten or even five years ago – is a great place to start. No change initiative will work without time, investment and the will from senior managers to see it through, and no business plan will work if the skills to execute it aren’t available. Leaders need to identify what they need: to brief their L&D team on what’s required. And that means thinking about L&D not as an operational unit delivering training here and there, but as a strategic team supporting the core pillars of the plan. If AI is offering Core HR teams the chance to delegate some of the admin and think more strategically, the thirst for skills may be the prompt for L&D to prove value in a more measurable, business-critical way.
Taking responsibility for skills
Employees are the last port of call. And while it is tempting – and partly true – to say that we all have responsibility for our own development, it’s also a little reductive: after all, it may not be clear to a junior employee how their knowledge of negotiation or coding is aligned to the wider objective. Being open about what we do and don’t know is an important step in analysing the skills gap. Once it’s clear where the gaps are, employees need to work with their manager to upskill to the right level and in the right areas.
It fits so neatly into existing performance management structures, with the added advantage that part of the measurement of skills growth can be seen in the success of achieved objectives. It’s not just training for training’s sake, but a true illustration of the benefits of learning in the flow of work, and measured against goals. It takes a little effort and allocated time, but shouldn’t that be the case anyway?
Ultimately, the employee owns their own skills. But if an organisation is serious about skills growth, and embeds it into the way people are managed and developed, it means that the success of upskilling can be measured not in courses completed or videos watched but in goals completed. Who owns skills? We all do. Perhaps the 2020s will be the Decade of Development.
