The supply chain management of skills

- Let's start with an analogy. Imagine for a moment that you are in charge of running a pizza factory. One ingredient you need is fresh tomatoes. You can either buy tomatoes or grow them. Now substitute tomatoes with skills and you'll see a similar conundrum when it comes to workforce planning. Recruiting partners will know whether there are a lot of tomatoes on the market. Maybe there was a bad year and the quality of tomatoes is poor, or you can only get tomatoes if you import them and pay a premium. On the other hand, L and D can tell you how long it takes to grow a tomato and how many they could grow in a season with the right conditions. If these two sides are not speaking to each other, then you could have a massive problem. You might end up with a surplus of skills not needed by your company or be too late to grow rare skills internally. Ultimately, this misalignment can lead to loss revenue and employee attrition. All too often, upskilling can be a scattered approach. Stakeholders approach L and D leaders with requests for learning across disparate functions and before you know it, there's duplication and inconsistency. No one wants this to happen. So we have to be more strategic. Not to add another buzzword but I like to call this rightskilling meaning ensuring every individual has the right skills for the work now and in the future. First place to start is numbers. A skills gap might be identified but that does not mean an entire department needs to be upskilled, which is a very common mistake. You want to have the right number of people skilled against the work that needs to be accomplished. So work with the business to determine exactly how many people require a particular skill. It comes back to the supply chain management. You do not want a surplus or a shortage. Secondly, people are not robots that can be programmed. You may identify a group of individuals who require upskilling, but not all of them will be motivated in the new skill. I remember being tasked with building a curriculum for a team who'd been hired for their ability to quickly process transactions, and a year later, the company wanted to transition them into sales positions. No matter the quality of the learning, for some, the role had changed so significantly they were no longer interested. A smart company should provide a few paths for upskilling to retain the top talent within the organization. Thirdly, it takes time to both upskill and recruit. If the business has an acute need for a skill, critical decisions might need to be made as to what will be faster and more advantageous for the company. Does it make more sense to look externally for talent? That said, never forget the massive amount of intrinsic knowledge an existing employee brings to a company. It is hard to put a price tag on that. Likewise, companies that invest in their own people have higher retention rates and employee engagement. It can be a balancing act to ensure you have the right number of skills within your organization. It's not something you can leave for annual planning. You need to monitor and calibrate often. Remember, your goal is to maintain that supply chain of skills, not just for today, but for the future.