Article: How tech can help firms tackle talent crisis

Technology

How tech can help firms tackle talent crisis

Technology can help firms to retain talent by building their skills and by developing succession pipeline
How tech can help firms tackle talent crisis
 

Today, HR technology enables what-if analyses and real-time workforce modelling to help leaders understand the implications of change

 

The stakes for developing effective talent are rising quickly. However, simply recruiting to find the right talent is not a sustainable solution. To achieve long-term success and sustainable competitive advantage, an organization must build an evergreen source of talent by developing people from within the organization, building on their strengths, and providing them with opportunities to innovate and advance their careers. Consider the top business challenges HR leaders are facing today: Workplace demographics are changing and while there are plenty of people who are willing to work, skills with high demand are in short supply.

Those days are over when employees were treated and considered as a homogenous group with similar interests and motivations. Millennials, who have unique demands and career goals, will make up nearly half of the working population by 2020 and organizations must strive to understand and fulfill that. It’s well known that the younger generation is drawn to a deliberately crafted organizational culture and job roles that they feel will make the world a better place. But more than anything, millennials want the opportunity to continuously develop the skills that will benefit them today and position them for the future. Today, a career is not just about job stability but also about opportunity, transparency, growth and personal fulfillment. Employees want to build their own future and feel empowered by what they do.

However, 39 per cent of employers report that they are having difficulty filling jobs due to the lack of available skilled talent, particularly positions that require specialized technology skills, according to a report in Harvard Business Review. Organizations spanning all sizes and industries need highly skilled workers in order to grow and continually improve their business. The inability to find, develop, assess and retain the critical skills an organization requires will significantly impact its ability to compete in a constantly evolving global economy.

How does your organization cope?

The key to attracting and retaining top talent is to ensure that organizations must provide a continuous culture of learning to its employees and offer them tools to drive their own development and advancement of their careers. To support this self-development, relevant content must be embedded directly and seamlessly into in an employee’s daily work and served up when he/she needs it. In today’s highly mobile, always-on world, employees have come to expect a simple, intuitive experience that makes their lives easier by delivering development opportunities in the moment of need, at any time, on any device and in whatever modality that best suits each individual.

Organizations can support employees in building skills for today’s and tomorrow’s business challenges by:

• Knowing each employee’s competencies and what they want to achieve in order to provide personalized experiences for on-the-job learning.

• Enticing people to engage in development initiatives by delivering an experience when and where they are working.

• Empowering employees by helping them understand their current strengths and skillmgaps, potential careers and the training to achieve their goals.

• Aligning individual employee performance with organizational performance.

• Rewarding and recognizing employees’ contribution and promoting their success to help them be seen as well-informed leaders.

Beyond delivering an adaptive, personalized development experience to employees, business leaders must embrace real-time succession planning. The ability to proactively determine the impact of changes to an organization’s talent structure, both planned and unplanned, is crucial to ensure changes in the workforce do not impede the business. Today’s HR technology enables what-if analyses and real-time workforce modeling to help leaders understand the implications of change. These solutions make it easier to identify and examine critical roles, highlight emerging leaders for those roles and then outline the learning and development needed to grow, support and retain top employees.

Organizations can stay ahead of the competition by delivering contextual information and actions, giving people the ability to immediately apply newly acquired knowledge, and anticipating workforce changes with a real-time succession planning process. 

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Topics: Technology, Workforce Management System, #TechHR2015

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