How to Identify & Solve Digital Skills Gap In Your Company?

If success and excellence are your primary business goal, then identifying your organization’s performance or skills gap is a critical need. Identifying skills gaps and coming up with ways to solve them is a skill that every employer should possess. 

Apart from being a critical aspect of your company’s success, identifying skills gaps will also help you get to know your company differently.

Understanding the Digital Skills Gap

A skills gap is the difference between the skills possessed by an employee and the skills needed by him/her to succeed in the work environment. It refers to the gap between the desired and actual performance of an employee.

However, a digital skills gap refers to the lack of digital knowledge and skills to flourish in the work environment. As digitalization has reached every area of personal and professional life, employees and employers need to flourish in the digital industry. This would not be possible without building essential skills.

According to a survey issued in 2019, about 52% of employees face these competency issues. They lack the essential skills and talents that are needed for them and the company to progress.

As an employer, it is your job to look for these digital skills gaps and solve them.

How to identify skills gaps in your organization?

With the definition out of the way, now you need to ask how to identify these skills gaps?

Every organization has these skills gaps, which result in low productivity and reduced efficiency. Therefore, knowing what is degrading your performance is essential if you want to up your corporate game.

4-step process to identifying it

Step 1- Identify your organization’s objectives.

First and foremost, you need to know what the primary objectives of your company are.

Every organization has its own set of goals based on the owner’s values, type of industry, or the company’s vision.

If you have a clear view of your short and long-term goals, you can use them to find the essential skills required to achieve them. By knowing your company’s future and present objectives, you can decide on the type of training that is to be given to your employees. Whether to focus on technology training, customer service skills, or maybe both.

Step 2- Identifying the skills needed to achieve these goals

After identifying your company’s goal, the next very important step is to identify the skills required to achieve these goals.

There are some critical skills that every employee should possess, including soft skills and hard skills. As an employer, you are entitled to research the type of skills you want your employees to learn.

An easy way to do this is by listing the skills as per priority. For example, your company’s supervisors might need expert level skills, whereas some employees might need proficiency and other skills.

This will give you a benchmark against the skills they already have.

Step 3- Identifying the skills your employees already have

Now that you know what training is to be given to the employees, you can analyze the skills that your employees already have. Gather the data from your existing employees. You can do this through surveys and feedback methods. Club the information regarding the existing skills of your employees. This will help you in knowing which employee has what skills and which skills are lacking in them.

Step 4- Analyze and compare the gathered data

The next step thereof is to analyze and compare the gathered data. This will take you a step closer to identifying the digital skills gap in your company.

Here is a simple formula that will help in calculating your organization’s skills gap.

Skills required – Existing skills= Skills gap

Apply this formula to compare your gathered data and know the skills gap in your business. Whether to train the existing workforce or hire a new one will depend on how major the skills gap is.

With this, you can now move on to searching for solutions to bridge your company’s skills gap.

How to bridge the skills gap in your organization?

After figuring out the skills gap in your company, you need to bridge these gaps by finding apt solutions. At this point, you can come up with plans for training and hiring. Therefore, you need to set your priorities in order before executing any program.

Tips to solving the skills gap

Study your competitors: Pay close attention to your competitors’ every move. Research their job listings to get an idea of their strategies to come up with your own.

Work on reskilling and upskilling: Solving the skills gap is a matter of upskilling and reskilling. You can do this by offering training and development programs. You have many options for solving the gaps, such as mentoring, e-learning programs, online courses, coaching, and more.

There are many online digital marketing courses available for you to choose from at DAN Institute. A crucial step to solving the skills gap is to create an engaging workforce environment. Cater to the needs of the employees and make them feel like a part of the organization.  Motivate and engage with your employees. This will boost their morale, and the employee will work on upskilling themselves.

Hire new talent: Hiring new talent is yet another method of closing the digital skills gap. If you feel like you need a new workforce apart from training the existing one, recruit new talent for your company.

Conclusion

Set up a benchmark of the crucial skills required in an employee and then hire accordingly. New workers will bring new ideas, skills, and knowledge to your organization, which will eventually boost your productivity.

The skills gap is a global gap occurring in most organizations. It is believed that two-thirds of the jobs created in the last decade need either a high or a moderate level of digital skills.

The global skills gap report 2018-19 by Udemy points out that about 62% of employees face issues and are affected by this gap. Therefore, it is evident why identifying and solving the skills gaps is crucial for your company’s survival.