Five ways to upskill and close skill gaps

Role and skill gap analysis will uncover some skill gaps in even the most mature team. This is especially true today when new ways to work are emerging, work is moving to teams and new technologies and business models are creating new roles with new skill requirements.

Learn more about Ibbaka’s Role Coverage and Skill Gap Analysis service

Given that skill gaps are inevitable, and likely to expand, it is important to have good ways to discover these gaps and then find ways to close them. At Ibbaka, we find these gaps through our role coverage and skill gap analysis solution. This generates reports like the one below, that call out the strengths and weaknesses of the team.

Given that there are skill gaps, how could we close them? We have seen companies combine five different approaches.

Move people into new roles
Have people share roles
Provide upskilling opportunities
Hire in new people
Outsource

Let’s look at each of these in more detail and then see how they can be combined.

Move people into new roles

This is often the best place to start. In many companies people are often not in the role that best suits their skills or their aspirations. If you have insight into these you can try to move people around so that there is a better match. Some organizations are sclerotic, and it is difficult to move people, especially across organizational boundaries, but the ability to do this is a key to having an adaptive organization. A bonus to this approach is that employee engagement is often improved by putting people in the roles that match their skills and aspirations.

Have people share roles

Quite often no one person has all the skills needed for a role, but there is another person who has a complementary skill set. With people looking for more flexible working relationships role sharing is becoming more popular. There are often organizational barriers to this, but along with internal mobility, role sharing is a key to having an engaged and adaptive workforce.

Provide upskilling opportunities

Once you have the best people in roles there will still be a need for upskilling. We all have skill gaps and things that we need to learn. At Ibbaka we connect learning resources to skills (and Activities and Roles). We are adding a skill page to our competency models to help us do this more effectively (see screenshot below).

“Learning resource’ could mean training courses, but for most of these roles coaching and mentoring combined with experiential learning will be more effective.

One thing to experiment with is ‘learning teams.’ Have teams that are meant to be places where people learn together. Provide a coach for these teams, and give them access to other learning resources, but have people learn by working together to create something of value.

Hire in new people

This is the obvious thing to do, but it should not be the default. Use the role and skill model to inform the hiring decision. Try adding potential hires to the team and seeing how it impacts role coverage.

Hiring needs to become much more flexible and skill focused. Role coverage and skill gap analysis can help you find the key people who will make the team more adaptive and effective.

Outsource

In some situations it is better to outsource than to try to fill the role from within your own company. This is the case when the role is commoditized and many people can do it and where deep knowledge of your solution is not required. Outsourcing is also an option when highly specialized skills that benefit from experience outside your organization are required (this is why business consulting remains a large business).

Build on strengths

Sometimes we get caught up in worrying about our shortcomings and fail to see our strengths. This happens at the individual, team and organizational levels. Skill strengths are more important than skill gaps. This is why the Ibbaka Role Coverage report starts by highlighting the skills that are strengths. There are usually a lot more skills that are strengths than gaps. One wants to find ways to invest in these skills and leverage them in the work.

It is a powerful thing to be able to see the skills of the people you work with. These are often the skills that give’s your company its differentiation and competitive advantage. Invest in them.