Organizations spend billions of dollars training employees, yet struggle to improve workforce capability in any significant way. The usual culprit is an underlying problem: training is built for convenience rather than need. Generic leadership, communication, or productivity training fills calendars while skill shortages that impact the work get ignored.
So does wasted money, disgruntled employees stuck with irrelevant training, and training that fails to address the capability gaps it was meant to fix. Building training programs that address skill shortages requires starting with the end in mind.
Understanding Existing Skill Shortages
Most training programs get built around a vendor’s catalogue or a list of popular courses. Organizations choose training they think will be useful, schedule it, and hope there’s something in it for those who attend.
This approach nearly guarantees that whatever training gets delivered bears little relation to what employees need to learn. Proper programs get built on the exact opposite premise.
Instead of building a program, identify specific capability shortages that create operational issues affecting business outcomes. This usually means identifying areas of the business where work gets stuck, quality issues arise, projects fail, or the organization battles to execute its strategy. Common operational issues usually trace back to skill shortages in specific areas.
A manufacturing organization might battle with quality issues in the inspection team because they lack statistical analysis skills. A marketing team might struggle with poor campaign performance because the members lack data analysis skills. It’s these kinds of skill shortages that make for effective building blocks for the training that will address skill shortages instead of gaps in generic professional development.
Assessing Skill Shortages
Assessing capability shortages can take different forms. Self-reported surveys are one approach, but they are notoriously unreliable. People don’t know what they don’t know, and some people are prone to overestimating their abilities while others underestimate them.
Observing people at work is another, but it has limited usefulness across a large organization. Testing skills is reliable when it comes to technical skills and testing training programs, but it struggles with softer skills.
Fortunately, organizations have some great online resources available to help assess the capability of the workforce in an organized fashion along different dimensions.
This free skill gap analysis tool can assist organizations in structuring their thinking around the capabilities they might be lacking in their workforce. The goal here is to move away from a general view of who has what skill shortage to something more structured and specific. Make an effort to identify which employees have which skill shortage. The task of building targeted training programs becomes far easier when that’s achieved.
Building Programs That Address The Gaps
Once skill shortages are identified, the next task is to build a program that targets building those abilities in employees. If the issue is a lack of data analysis skills in the marketing team, there’s no value in offering them generic data analysis training.
The training must relate to the specific situation. Context is needed to make a new skill relatable and usable. If you’re teaching negotiation skills to the sales team, they need context about their industry, their specific product range and their customers. Teaching them generic negotiation theories in the absence of context achieves very little when they get back to work.
Effective training programs cover three different areas: introducing the concepts, getting to practice them and performing well.
Most training that takes place in corporate environments gets stuck at the first hurdle. People are trained in concepts but are not given opportunities to practice what they’ve learned and receive feedback on their performance. This also explains why people seldom use the skills they learned at corporate training sessions.
Avoiding The Easy Option
Organizations often look for training options that will be easy to implement. Online course libraries offer thousands of options that can be implemented in the organization at any time that suits the participants. Just because it’s easy to implement does not mean it will benefit the employees.
External organizations will happily sell you a program they’ve already developed instead of customizing one for your specific needs. They will always find a way to position whatever they have as a solution to your training needs. The training may have value, but it often does not address the capabilities that your employees lack.
Internal corporate universities face the same constraints. Building genuinely customized programs takes time and expertise. It’s far easier to use existing resources or select a program from a list of corporate training options.
Making Training Sticky
Even well-built training that targets existing gaps will fail if people do not use what they’ve learned when they get back to work. Employees learn plenty of useful things in good courses, but forget them as they catch up on work.
Forgetting to use new skills can be avoided by building opportunities into a training program for people to apply what they’ve learned as soon as possible after the course.
This can take different forms. Assigning a project that requires using new capabilities is one. Another is building follow-up opportunities into the program where managers or peers check whether individual employees are using the capabilities they’ve learned.
If you offer training to overcome a specific capability gap, there should be ways to determine whether the program has achieved its objectives. Avoid elaborate measuring systems and rather keep it simple by assessing whether the operational issues that created the gap have been resolved.
Linking Spend and Value
Organizations find it difficult to stop spending money on learning programs because they struggle to link them to business outcomes.
That becomes easier when the programs get built around existing capability gaps that affect operational outcomes. Training becomes a measurable value when an employee’s ability to do something improves after attending a good training course.
An employee who could not provide proper customer service before receiving communication skills training becomes good at it afterwards. An employee who made many mistakes before quality control training makes fewer mistakes after that.
These scenarios are easy to spot. You don’t need any involved analysis to identify them. Look for basic outcomes like identifying whether a project had a faster turnaround after project management training.
Training programs that aim to fill existing capability gaps deliver value. This stands in stark contrast to generic corporate programs that people attend with no real idea of what they will gain from them.
Building programs that address capability shortages takes more effort than selecting an option from an external vendor. The effort pays off by ensuring you build training programs that enhance your workforce’s capabilities instead of turning them into something that just has to be completed for professional development purposes.
