To counter increasing skills gaps, organisations should focus on skill building

CANBERRA, Australia - Jan. 4, 2023 - PRLog -- In today's working world, the pace of change is accelerating. Skills gaps are emerging at a faster rate than ever before. Roles are evolving and new fields are emerging. In order to keep empowering internal mobility, organisations need to help employees develop new and crucial skills. That's the lowdown from the Acorn subject matter experts' latest article on skills. In their article, the experts discuss skill types, investing in skills and how to build crucial skills.

Skills come in two complementary categories: hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are teachable, quantifiable and measurable. They are honed through practice and education, enabling an individual to do their job. Soft skills (also known as people skills) can be considered the way an individual performs a hard skill. Training for soft skills can help individuals develop a hard skill more easily.

Building skills is crucial for several reasons. It's the key to attracting (and retaining) high performers who are agile and allows organisations to match the pace of change more readily with a larger candidate pool. It also sees less micromanaging thanks to employees having the capability to manage more work themselves.

"Skills are one of three key elements of your organisational capabilities, alongside knowledge and behaviours," said Blake Proberts (Co-Founder and Managing Director). "Without a clear understanding of skills gaps in your workforce, as well a as plan to develop them, you're missing a crucial part of a capability. And that only means it's likely workforce capability is not going to be up to the standards necessary to meet business outcomes."

A key element of good learning strategies is they give power back to the learner. Some learning strategies that adhere to this include personalised pathways, learning in the flow of work, mentoring and cross-team collaboration.

You can read the Acorn experts' full article about skills on Acorn Labs: https://hubs.ly/Q01sDKWN0

Pursuit Technology is one of Australia's fastest growing HR technology companies. Pursuit, via Acorn LMS, takes a different view to strategically enabling HR and L&D teams compared to traditional providers. Rather than focusing on analytics after learning experience, their products use workforce planning and capability frameworks prior to any learning. By linking to a company's strategy, Pursuit products can inform organisational capability gaps and suggest education, deliver this education, then measure the impact – proving business impact by the HR and L&D team in a quantifiable way.