How existing employees can close technical skill gaps at your organization
Rather than hiring to meet specific talent needs, try identifying “skill adjacencies” in your current workforce.
The technical skills gap is growing — and it’s a serious problem for employers. With the pandemic pushing businesses to accelerate digital transformation, organizations can’t keep up with the demand for advanced IT and programming skills.
Historically popular upskilling programs like employee tuition reimbursement for post-graduation studies and months-long coding “boot camps” no longer cut it. A post-graduate degree program can take anywhere from one to five years, often too long for employers to see a return on investment. Short-term tech boot camps are also typically used by professionals looking to change careers. As a result, these programs focus on a generalized skill set that supports a career pivot, not the specific skills a company needs.
Related: Employee skills gap threatens America’s economic growth
Employers are now at a crossroads of how to solve technical needs in their operations. Fortunately, subject matter experts are right in front of them: their employees. And although digital transformation has created many technical skill gaps in businesses, some technologies are more within reach to upskill employees in an efficient manner.
Identifying adjacencies
Instead of filling skill gaps by hiring costly IT and software engineers or investing in time-consuming degree or boot camp programs, you should consider identifying “skill adjacencies” in your current workforce. This process involves recognizing workers who possess skills that closely match required technical skills and training them through to a higher level of expertise.
Say you need to modernize your customer service offering and build out a new intake request process for customers. If you have an employee who knows their way around Microsoft Excel and your customer relationship management (CRM) tool, you have a potential upskilling candidate with a foundation of skill adjacencies and domain knowledge.
You can then pair this employee’s base-level skill set with no- or low-code digital technology — software that allows employees with minimal technical knowledge to build work applications and digital system workflows. A no- and low-code approach works similarly to the way WordPress and Squarespace have enabled users to easily build websites through drag and drop functions and uploading photos.
Enabling employees to build business solutions with skill adjacencies also solves the expertise dilemma we sometimes see when hiring software developers. While valuable, developers typically aren’t experts in the department that requires the technical solution they build.
Let’s go back to our customer service example. Instead of a developer learning your customer service process and building a technical solution, your customer service employee can digitize the customer service workflow while leveraging adjacent skills and their departmental expertise. This process can save your business money on hiring expensive developer talent and turn existing employees into citizen developers, defined by Gartner as “a user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT.”
How to identify employees with skill adjacencies
Gartner research recently found that 68% of HR leaders plan to build critical skills and competencies among their companies’ workforces in 2021. If you’re one of the companies planning to boost your workforce’s skill sets, you’ll need an upskilling strategy.
In reality, not everyone will be a shoo-in to fill your company’s technical skill gaps. However, by implementing a three-tiered learning program, you can better identify employees with skill adjacencies through hands-on, interactive courses, and uplevel the skill sets of your employees overall. There are few key components to consider in building out your tiered learning program:
- Tier 1: Use your first tier as a foundational course. This stage should cover the basics like navigation, critical concepts and workflow creation. Even if an employee only completes this portion of your program and doesn’t proceed to tier 2, this foundational tier still offers value. At the very least, employees can gain greater insight into your company’s processes and better understand the value no- and low-code technology brings to their work.
- Tier 2: The second part of the program should offer deeper insight into the “whys” and “hows” behind no- and low-code technology. This tier could be a springboard to new career paths employees can achieve through upskilling. Lessons in this tier should enable the employee to build workflows in the platform. Consider including a test at the end of the program to ensure the employee has a basic understanding of no- and low-code building principles.
- Tier 3: Your last tier should be for employees who are interested in learning advanced techniques and building more complex workflows. These courses should involve more intricate lesson plans, deeper learning on low-code skills and an advanced certification test to cap it all off.
A win-win opportunity
There’s no denying the challenges of filling technical skill gaps. But HR leaders have a win-win opportunity for their organizations. By identifying employees with strong skill adjacencies through a tiered learning program, you can leverage existing talent to close skill gaps and create revenue-driving tech solutions for your business.
However, the biggest win perhaps doesn’t go to your business in the end, but to your employees. In a world where technology is displacing many jobs, an upskilling program uses technology to create new career opportunities for employees. Because while technology is good by itself, it’s even better with great people behind it.
Sean Chou is CEO at Catalytic.
Read more: