Why you hope you have a talent shortage (and a skills gap)
Smart business leaders are concerned with talent and the skills available to deliver on strategy. Smarter leaders want to have a skills gap.
Why?
Ask yourself why you might not have a skills gap.
Your business is mature, you have been doing it for a long time, and you have all the bases covered.
Your business is a commodity, lots of people know how to do it, and the people are more or less interchangeable.
Your workforce is in their prime, no one is retiring or leaving the company.
Then ask why you might have a skills gap.
Your business is growing, you are adding customers, your customers are coming back for more, and they trust you with new things.
You are adding new lines of business and exploring new areas.
You have people entering and leaving your company, there is enough turnover as people leave with their skills new people with new skills are coming in.
Companies that have no skills gap are stagnating. They are in mature businesses (a nice way to say businesses that have stopped growing) and are likely in the process of being commoditized. Commoditized businesses face extreme price pressure, today from lower cost geographies and in the future from intelligent automation and robots.
If your company has a growth strategy, and it is executing on it, you are going to have some skill gaps, but what kind of skill gaps?
There are good skill gaps and bad skill gaps.
Good skill gaps:
Business is growing, you need more people
Business is changing, you need new skills
Customers trust you, you are bringing in skills
Bad skills gaps
People are leaving, you have high churn
Technology changed, and somehow you missed it
Skills are decaying, your company and its culture are in a rut
How you go about managing skill gaps will depend on why the gap has opened up and your business strategy. But in any case you will need to know your current skill map to see where the gaps are. Below is a Skill Map from TeamFit. You can quickly see what skills are in the company, at what levels, and what projects they are being applied to.
