The ‘responsibility’ of HR to address the skills gap

Across the board, many businesses are not prepared for the future of work, according to this pair, who shared key tips for HR teams and professionals in driving their organisations forward.

Speaking on a recent episode of the HR Leader Podcast, produced in partnership with Cornerstone and Pinpoint HRM, Cornerstone APJ group vice president and managing director Paul Broughton and Cornerstone practice head at Pinpoint HRM Katie Mangraviti discussed the growing pace of change across the globe over the last five years, as well as the readiness, skills and visibility gaps businesses are currently facing.

While many organisations have struggled to keep up with the pace of change over the course of the last few years, there are three key things businesses need to be addressing moving into 2025, according to Broughton.

“There's different levels of readiness, maturity and commitment. But if you break it down, we think of it in three key ways. We've got the skills issue. You've got to address that. Start with a skills inventory, start small. Then you've got an expectations challenge. So, once you've identified the skills that you have, the skills that you need, you want to move forward. You still need to align that to the goals of the business,” he said.

“And then you've got the visibility issue where that's underpinning all of this. To do the inventory to align to the business. You've got to have the technology that can extract what you have today. AI can help in a really, really meaningful way there because it's a big project, but actually the work that needs to be done is being expedited because AI can really help on that journey.”

This tech can also assist organisations in understanding the skillsets of their employees better, added Mangraviti.

“Up until now it has been an extremely costly project, a year-plus long project to actually understand the skills of your job and the skills of your people. But then after you've done it, it's out of date. Like it's literally the day that you complete that piece of work, it's out of date. So, it's only now that the tech is really caught up,” she said.

“So, rather than being a year long project and out of date on day one, businesses can almost be up and running with understanding the skills of the jobs and their people within months. And then it proactively evolves for them as the skills change rather than being out of date.”

However, Mangraviti urged organisations to not get too discouraged when thinking about these issues.

“Don't feel like just because you haven't answered this problem that you're way behind. It is quite often that we're talking to organisations that they're wanting to get here, but they haven't taken that step yet. I think the other big point of that is definitely having that top-down approach, but it is a true organisational transformation,” she added.

“The change management, the communication, this isn't something that is going to happen overnight. For a business to suddenly, you know, have that skills approach and be agile is a true organisational transformation and you know, everyone needs to be on board to support that change.”

For businesses, being able to work with their employees, rather than against them, can also help address a key “expectations gap” Cornerstone has observed.

“The businesses have good intent, 89 per cent think they're doing a great job. Only 39 per cent of employees agree. And if the organisation is going on this journey, involve the employees, get their feedback. Run surveys, engagement surveys, do different levels of interaction with them to say, hey, what does this look like to you? We want to go on this journey with you together, here are the outcomes we want. But you're part of this,” Broughton said.

“That's when you start bridging the delta between what the company's trying to achieve and what the employees’ expectations actually are. And then you have those parameters of the pace of the change in the industry and you've got the demographic change too, because a mobility strategy for baby boomers might be really different than a millennial's. And do they want to go up the career ladder or through the lattice and have more mobility? Those are the conversations that you need to have.”

Taking small but incremental steps to address this gap can help businesses start to both close the gap and keep up with change moving forward.

“I think the first thing is to have a look internally at your organisation as every business is in a different situation and position and what may be urgent to one is not urgent to another. So, one organisation that I've spoken to recently is an Australian wide hospitality business and they want employees typically kind of hiring young travellers to be able to travel around Australia working for them rather than going to other organisations,” Mangraviti added.

“But when they looked internally they found out that individuals were actually resigning and then applying for another job in a different state. The extra administrative workload across their business to manage that is unnecessary, where if they had technology and could be agile, it's a quick fix for them and it gets them that one step closer to actually having an internal mobility skills base. So, there's big projects here that we're talking about, but it could be those little things that get an organisation that one step closer to that kind of utopia outcome in the end.”

Further, in terms of the role of the HR department when it comes to these issues, Mangraviti said she is currently seeing a combination of skills-specific roles, as well as executives making it a higher priority.

“New roles are being created across organisations where there's people who are head of Skills Transformation or workforce agility, titles that we haven't previously seen across businesses. But if you're a HR person, you are on the ground as the person to really get it started, educate your executives of the risk. If we don't do this, we're going to lose our top talent,” she said.

“Our competitors are out there, they are cross skilling, reskilling, you know, mobilising their talent. We're behind. So, it's not just the individual perspective as an employee, but there's huge business impacts if people don't at least start talking about it, understanding the importance of it. And I would say that is definitely HR's responsibility to start that conversation in their organisation.”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Paul Broughton and Katie Mangraviti, click here.