A Guide in Addressing the Skills Gap With Career Pathing (Guest blog)

The business world is evolving at a continually increasing rate. The technology, landscape, and service delivery change almost daily and force organizations to scramble to stay ahead or keep up. Tech innovation, without a doubt, is wildly beneficial as it can mean efficacy. It creates time and cost-effective workflows and increases productivity.

While these advancements can help shape businesses for the better, they also create specific challenges in the workforce.

In order to compete economically, businesses race towards digital transformations. This continuous race creates a demand for high technical skills. In turn, this need creates a skills gap, which, if left unaddressed, threatens employee satisfaction and company productivity. Moreover, the gap can create problems finding people with the right skill set to hire.

Importance of Addressing Skills Gap

One crucial reason the skills gap needs to be addressed links to productivity. While innovation aims to increase a company's productive capacity, the inability to find highly skilled workers to do the job can mean the opposite. Simply put, the cost of growth with low productivity leads to devastating results.

How to Address Skills Gap with Career Pathing

A critical action step to addressing the skills gap is ensuring employee satisfaction. This step includes enticing, hiring, and retaining the highly skilled workers you need. Career advancement opportunities can serve as an influential motivating factor for employees to stay or apply for specific roles.

With transparency and well-laid career paths, companies stand to gain engaged, satisfied, and effective employees.

This is where career pathing becomes crucial.

Career pathing is simply a documented discussion or recorded plans regarding an employee's career goals while in the company. The plan reflects action steps on how they can move from one position to another, including training and certifications. This outline serves as a clear-cut guide on how they can achieve their career goals.

Career pathing provides motivation for increased employee output and allows the company to identify necessary training and initiatives to bring workers to optimum productivity.

From a recruiter's view, this practice could be the key to attracting top and highly skilled talents to apply for hard-to-fill roles.

Career pathing is one of the best ways to identify employees suited for particular positions. Moreover, it allows the company to identify critical skills and design necessary training to help develop their employees.

How a Project Manager can Help Establish Career Pathing

Another vital step in a company's improvement initiative is hiring a project manager. Many well-planned projects have floundered simply because of an inability to keep up with technology and market changes. Having a project manager can help organizations adjust methodologies according to what is necessary at a given time.

According to Project Manager Job Descriptions – The Ultimate Guide, a project manager has several key responsibilities. They must evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of initiatives and must be familiar with the planning, budgeting, and implementation stages. This role gives them a clear view of the entire process and allows them to anticipate potential issues before they arise.

A project manager works closely with HR to identify requirements, foresee skills gaps, and create smart solutions. Some of the most effective ways to address the skills gap include skills analysis, coaching, mentoring, and training.

In closing, aligning your talent pool with business needs is critical to success. In an ever-evolving world that craves new technology at every turn, your approach to addressing skills gaps truly dictates your organization's future.