How to Close IT Skills Gap for Today's Digital Organizations

[Manjeet Singh]

 

What is IT Skill Gap?

Forbes defines a skills gap as the difference between what companies need or want their employees to do and what employees are actually able to do. A skills gap can apply to any skills area: hard skills like sales, business, finance, and IT, as well as soft skills like interpersonal communication and time management.

Companies are spending close to $170 Billions on traditional learning & development solutions in the United States alone, yet 70% of employees are unhappy with their career opportunities at work, and the majority believe it’s because their companies are not providing the development resources that employees need in order to succeed and grow.

In many ways, solving a skill gap is like solving a puzzle—not only do you have to make the pieces fit, you have to make sure you have all the necessary pieces from the get-go. That includes a list of the required skills and competencies for each job role, assessment of what you have versus what you need, identification of high performers and best practices, necessary training, and measurement of results.

Let’s understand what are the reasons for the IT skills gap, how to identify them, and how to bridge the gap that is in alignment with your current requirements and the future vision.

Reasons for IT Skills Gap

Industry insiders cite many reasons for this IT skills gap, including:

- Every company is slowly becoming a technology company: As companies need to both maintain and optimize ever-increasing technology, they need more people to support this mission. Many organizations are pursuing digital transformation initiatives, only to realize the projects are inherently dependent upon onboarding individuals with the right skillset. As a result, a sudden increase of IT skills has emerged in recent years.

- The expectation around how people work is changing: As millennials join the workforce, they expect more consumer-like, on-demand experience from IT delivery teams. This means employee experience is becoming a key driver for digital transformation and intelligent automation initiatives.

- Demand and supply gap: In the period 2018 to 2022, an average of 42% of the shift in IT skills is expected. Hiring managers are therefore increasingly focusing on recent graduates equipped with the latest digital skills most relevant to their digital transformation initiatives.

- The role of IT is expanding from enabler to inspiring business strategy: Early on, only traditional businesses were implementing technology. Today, however, industries beyond business require a vast amount of IT, especially education and healthcare. Cloud computing and artificial intelligence solutions are the primary drivers for this trend. Not every organization needs to develop and deploy a technology solution in-house. Instead, they can leverage SaaS services readily available as an affordable OpEx. However, IT professionals with the right skills to take advantage of these latest digital solutions are still needed across all organizations.

- The way we learn IT skills is changing: More people are re-tooling outside of traditional degree-granting colleges and universities, opting instead for short-term, intensive developer boot camps that provide the hard IT skills, but leaving this population short of degrees. This lack of a formal degree may mean that without a specific degree, some companies are missing out on this talent pool. Further, the boot camps focus primarily on programming skills – and considerably less time on business know-how, which could affect a candidate’s soft skills for a position.

- The technology landscape is evolving fast: Individuals specialized in a select few skills will be required to learn additional skills to leverage the advancing technologies. When we envelop the physical world with a digital layer, the interactions & processes change in ways yet to be imagined.

Learn How to Identify Skill Gaps

IT Leaders need to understand what capabilities are lacking in their teams. A skills gap analysis is a structured approach to identify the current and future skills needed, and the gaps that exist. A lack of skills here can impact service delivery, customer service, and productivity.

How to Close the IT skills gap?

Without a strategic plan for the IT workforce, companies will continue having difficulties finding quality IT candidates. When positions go unfilled, there is the immediate impact of inefficiency, but there’s collateral damage, too. Decreased employee morale leads to attrition. This means companies risk losing existing talent. So, what measures are companies taking to fix this gap?

For most companies, this talent gap is self-inflicted. Addressing the skills gap will take time, but by planning strategically and increasing communication, clarity, and standardization in job expectations, employees can better prepare.

A playbook to close the IT skills gap

1. Identify Learning Opportunities Based on the Skills Gap and Future Vision

First, you need a Skills Management tool where you can track the list of skills and who has those skills. Then you need to build a Skills Management dashboard to analyze trends by assessing skill gaps in your organization and plan for coaching or training of your employees based on needs. Identify users and teams who have the right skills to work on tasks and projects, skill competencies of users, the tasks that require those skills, and skill gaps you can address to fulfill your organizational needs.

2. Create Engaging and Continuous Learning Experience.

The traditional methods are really ineffective for many reasons. What we need is an In Moment Coaching Solution that can provide coaching and deliver microlearning to improve the agent’s performance right when it’s needed the most. You should build a Coaching feedback loop to proactively tackle the skills gap, and approach learning as a natural part of your everyday workflows. In an ever-changing business environment, employee learning shouldn't be seen as a time-limited activity based on a predetermined training schedule, but as an ongoing, continuous process. 

3. Teach Employees to Train Themselves.

Making time for learning can be difficult, not just because employees are already spread thin, but many organizations aren’t set up to deliver learning in a moment of need. The learning experience has become fragmented with the explosion of content and digital systems. In turn, employees are turning to Google for the easy answer which is outside the purview of learning and development (L&D). Learning must be consumable, centralized, accessible, relevant and available in a variety of modalities. This will empower employees to develop the skills they need to move up within an organization.
 

4. Embrace Continuous Improvement.

You need a lightweight continual improvement framework to proactively identify improvement opportunity related to people development. Doing a process mining on how people work in your organization can quickly help identify easy wins. You can start with one team and then slowly foster a learning culture and invest in your training infrastructure and content. To facilitate employee training, you should also provide them with an easy-to-use, always-on, online platform. 

5. Benchmarks and Monitor Progress.

The reality is, we can’t manage what we aren’t measuring. ServiceNow Benchmarking is a great way to find how you compare with your industry peers. You need a way to tie learning activities to skill development, to track and measure progress, and benchmark skills in order to get an accurate snapshot of progress over time. Define your success KPIs and share the outcome progress with all key stakeholders as you reduce the IT skills gap. 

In Summary, for employees' development to be successful, everyone has to take responsibility. Companies urgently need to consider people's skills development as an essential strategic priority to build today the leaders they need for tomorrow. L&D’s role is to provide easy access to tools and systems, managers are responsible for providing motivation and incentives, and employees need to make time for growth and create daily habits of developing their skills. If employees are unhappy and unengaged with the current skills development solutions, companies must respond by adopting self-directed, flexible solutions that make learning opportunities more accessible for their people.

Other related topics and reading: 

ServiceNow Coaching App: A smarter real-time Coaching solution for IT agents and employees

Use real-time benchmarking to identify gaps and improve service performance

Continual Improvement: How do fit organizations drive service excellence?