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skills gap Archives - SourceMatch

Sep 09
0
skills gap

Skills gap is here. How to Address it?

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What is the “Skills Gap”?

The ‘skills gap’ is the phrase used to describe the difference between the skills that employers want, as shown by their job advertisements, and those that are available from professionals looking for a job. According to Glassdoor, the high needs jobs include: project manager, physician assistant, software engineer, marketing manager, nurse practitioner, business analyst, operations manager, occupational therapist, electrical engineer, and product manager.

The top reasons for the skills gap include: competition from other employers, candidates who do not have the needed experience, candidates who do not have the correct technical skills, low number of applicants, non-competitive benefits or salaries, and candidates who do not have the right soft skills (shrm.org).

To address the skills gap, companies will need both short and long term goals. There are many ways to help support business growth, while also addressing the skills gap seen within some sectors. To do this, businesses need to be prepared. SourceMatch helps businesses prepare for both the long and short term employee skills gap.

Long Term

Provide Career and Professional Growth

Companies can better prepare for the skills gap by providing career and professional growth options; to employees. Managers can set up discussions about opportunities for more education in high need areas, and learn from consulting companies such as SourceMatch, about the current skills trends. By doing this, you invest in your workforce and create career ladders for employees. SourceMatch stays up to date on the current high need skills, as well as how to educate your workforce in those areas.

Invest in Future Employees

Investing in future employees can mean a few things. Employers can reach out to high school students as well as college students, and share knowledge about your organization, industry and how they can best prepare to be a valuable professional. This will create an interest for students to possibly invest in the skills needed for your company. To do this, SourceMatch can help, by offering our consulting and recruiting services. Sharing knowledge of your company’s needs and wants, better prepares the future employees, as well as your company. Your company can get a better grasp of the future workforce as well.

Provide the Cost of Education

Companies are also offering to cover some or all of the cost of education for their employees. According to Forbes, Many companies like Starbucks, Walmart, Chipotle, and Disney offer tuition assistance for employees. This boosts employee retention and morale, as employees can “grow” with their company.

Short Term

Refer to Outsourcing

For immediate hiring needs, SourceMatch offers assistance to companies looking to fill their skills gap. We specialize in finding and retaining the right talent. Outsourcing recruiting, allows for an immediate request to be filled, as we do the legwork in regards to finding the right candidates for the open roles. Because we specialize in consulting and recruiting, your company is enabled to be efficient at using valuable resources and funds, as we use our validated Engaged Recruiting model to find and fill in those skill gaps.

Utilize Recruiting and Consulting Services

To utilize recruiting and consulting services, companies reach out for qualified support. SourceMatch specializes in filling the skills gap for companies. Using our services, companies save time and money training or retaining “high needs” positions. In the short term, companies who use our services, are able to fill in their skills gap. Recruiting and consulting companies can reach out to untapped sources of talent, that many companies are not even aware of.

The Evolution of Technology

How to Keep Up

The digital skills gap is costing the US economy roughly $1 trillion in lost productivity – Entrepreneur. To keep up in the new age of IT, companies can utilize recruiting organizations; to fill their skills gap. Because technology changes so quickly, the workforce can lag a bit behind. This makes it so valuable for companies to stay ahead of the gap. By planning and using SourceMatch’s consulting services, companies are better prepared for future IT skills gaps.

Training the Workforce to Evolve

Many companies also offer paid training and certificate courses, for employees to learn and grow. This is a faster-paced solution to that individual skill gap. By doing this, employers and employees can keep up with the current high needs skills.

Faster Learning Opportunities (Rather Than Traditional 4 Year Degrees)

Some of the top-paying certificates take less time to earn than a traditional 4-year degree. These certificates may need a certain level of experience or hours, though. Some top paying certificates include: Google Cloud Architect, PMP, ScrumMaster, AWS Architect and Developer, MCSE, ITIL, CISM, CRISC, CISSP, CEH, Citrix Associate, CompTIA, and Cisco (CCNP). By gaining a base level of knowledge and then gaining a certificate, employees and employers can bridge both blue-collar and white-collar skills gaps.

The Case for Creativity in the Workplace

To keep up with the skills gap, many companies are turning to creative time in the workplace. This allows employees to “think and plan” and develop solutions to current skills needs. By allowing creativity in the early years of employment, professionals gain a way to be “forward thinkers” allowing them to innovate and create solutions for the future. Some companies also rotate managers, to allow for new, fresh ideas in the workplace. By switching things up, companies can evolve and entertain the skills gap, rather than be forced into it.

By being prepared for both the long and short term, future and present skills gap, companies can save time and money. Using creativity, planning, outsourcing, and education, companies can overcome the skills gap and create a veritable, efficient workforce.

Reach out to us to see how we can bridge the skill gap together.

Jul 31
4
skills gap

10 Skills gap Statistics – Jobs are here but People are not

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We gathered 10 recruiting statistics to shed some light on the skills gap reality:

1. 80% of Americans agree there is a skills gap, and 35% say it affects them personally
2. Unfilled jobs cost the United States’ economy $160 billion a year
3. 81% of employers said prospective employees lack critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills
4. 75% of employers think graduates lack adequate innovation and diversity skills
5. 90 percent of hiring managers stated it’s difficult to find and hire the right tech talent and 83 percent said the shortage of tech talent is slowing company revenue growth
6. Job seekers’ resumes only match 59 percent of hard skills and 62 percent of soft skills in job ads
7. White-collar job seekers match hard skills 184 percent better and soft skills 42 percent better than blue-collar workers
8. 72% of respondents think skills needed for their jobs will change, and 73% say they’ve already had to gain additional skills to do their jobs
9. 80% of those who said the skills for their jobs will change also said they’d quit if their employers didn’t offer the requisite training
10. 41% of employers are set to focus their reskilling provision on high-performing employees while a much smaller proportion of 33% stated that they would prioritize at-risk employees in roles expected to be most affected by technological disruption. In other words, those most in need of reskilling and upskilling are least likely to receive such training.

How do YOU bridge the skills gaps? Let us help and find the right solutions for you.

Jul 18
0
industry

Future of jobs Across Industries

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The impact on each industry that invests in new technologies is determined by the task structure of each sector and whether industry leaders intend to automate or augment specific tasks.
Robotic technology is set to be adopted by 23% to 37% of the companies surveyed, with variations by industry.

Financial Services & Investors industry are most likely to signal the planned adoption of humanoid robots in the period up to 2022, also promise to be an early adopter of distributed ledger technologies (73% of respondents expect their enterprise to adopt its use)
Machine learning is expected to be adopted across a range of industries, including banking and insurance, in the medical field, across the energy sector, and in the consumer sector, where it may enhance the industry’s ability to model demand.

What is the prediction for the Energy and Consumer sectors? The expectation is that physical and manual work activities will be replaced. If today 38% and 30% of such tasks in these two sectors are performed by machines and algorithms, by 2022, those rates are expected to be 56% and 50% respectively.
Today 25% of labor in the Information & Communications Technology industry is performed by machines and algorithms, while an increase to 46% is projected for 2022.

What about the skills gap?
According to respondents to the Future of Jobs Survey, more than 55% of workers across the Aviation, Travel & Tourism; Financial Services & Investors; Chemistry, Advanced Materials & Biotechnology; and Global Health & Healthcare sectors will need some reskilling.
All industries expect sizable skills gaps, with that at least 50% of their workforce requiring training to reskill or upskill.

How do you plan to bridge the gaps?
At SourceMatch, we work with our clients to look at how candidates fair in their personal development objectives, openness to learning new technologies and adapting to new market conditions.

May 01
0
skills gap

Skills Gap in the US Part 1

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Business and HR leaders are concerned about this skills shortage (and here we are talking about the skills required by US businesses and the skills US workers have) and among HR professionals, 75% of recruiters deal with this skills gap among candidates who apply for job openings.
With implications and impact on the overall economy, the talent shortage is a serious challenge for organizations intensified by new technologies they use.

Let’s talk about numbers.
According to the 2019 State of the Workplace report, there were 7 million jobs open in December 2018, with only 6.3 million unemployed people looking for work.
“over 50% of respondents feel that skills shortages have worsened or greatly worsened in their organizations in the last two years.”

Missing skills.
The trade skills (Carpentry, plumbing, welding, machining, etc.) are the top technical skills missing, and among soft skills missing, we find problem-solving, critical thinking, innovation, and creativity.

“83% of respondents have had trouble recruiting suitable candidates in the past 12 months.” Why?
To make a point, in this following infographic we list the top reasons why organizations are struggling to hire the right candidate for the job: competition from other employees, candidates that do not have the needed work experience, nor technical skills, mismatched salary, benefits are not competitive for the market, and so on.

Although it is a burden for many employers and recruiters out there, it can create an opportunity for a company to identify the missing skill, figure how to obtain them, and get a sense of how to position their workforce for the future of work.

Fortunately, there are several ways in which the skills gap can be reduced.
How do you bridge the skills gap? Where there’s a problem, there’s a solution. Follow us and stay tuned for the second part of the graphic, where we look at what can be done.

 

Oct 05
0
Threat or opportunity

Skills gap | Threat or Opportunity?

By | Blog, Career, Future of work, Job, Leadership, Recruiting | No Comments

Even in a world flooded with information accessed at a distance of a “click” – one that fuels a competitive and constantly changing global economy – the workforce market is faced with a widespread challenge: the lack of skills required to tackle today’s business environment. How do we go about solving this issue?

The global competition demands a different skill set

Technology has changed the way the world is connected. Competition is global and it doesn’t matter where you are located on the map: Romania, India, US, etc. because you have lots of competitors for the same market share and talent. As a result, there is a constant need for skills in the market. Employers have high expectations and want to see a strong mix of a positive attitude towards work, technical knowledge, proactivity, solving issues in a timely manner, entrepreneurial skills, and social skills. Young graduates have fewer chances to get hired, as their current skills (or lack of them) don’t fit employers’ reality.

Studies show that around 80% of graduates work in a different field than the one they have graduated from. Still, they invest energy, time and money to graduate from a University and obtain a degree that they thought would be key to enter the marketplace.

And that raises the question: “Where is the disconnect?”

How do young graduates get a dream job when organizations don’t give them a chance?

The idea is simple – employers don’t want to invest in graduates if they don’t have the required experience. The reason? The risk for new hires changing their jobs right after having been trained is significant, especially with so many available jobs on the market. This pushes employers right back to square one.

Why not change the Educational System?

Young people go to universities with the hope that after getting their degree they can enter the workforce right away and bring value to it with their fresh enthusiasm. Disappointment sets in quite rapidly when they face reality: the market does not accept them unless they are properly prepared. All starts from the ground-up: the Education System, which offers too much theory and insufficient practice.

Now what?

To begin thinking about a solution there are 3 key matters that need our attention:

(1) restoring communication between universities and organizations in the marketplace, thus offering students the chance to get prepared for what the marketplace actually needs;

(2) keeping the information always accurate and in accordance with the demand;

(3) offering them practical training while still in school, by implementing a strategy in which internships are a significant part of the grading system, right from their first year of studies.

Both companies and young graduates would benefit from this.

There is a significant amount of change that needs to be done if we want to see graduates find jobs that they can bring value to from day one. It boils down to teaching students what they really need to thrive in a global market, and focus their educational process on pragmatic skills (i.e. problem-solving, creative collaboration, effective communication, thinking out of the box), not just theory. That can only be achieved with the help of organizations that need to transfer back into education the very skills that they wish to see in graduates.

Let’s get to work!