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T
he workforce skills gap is a topic that’s become increasingly more
prevalent in the past few years. The division between the skills
required for the job versus the skills the potential job candidate
already has seems to be continually growing in today’s job market. So how do
we bridge that gap?
First, the responsibility of assessing and addressing the skills gap is really three-
fold, falling on the supervisor, employee and the training educator. During the
recruiting stage, supervisors must look for and hire candidates with the requisite
knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies required to do the job. However,
there’s always going to be a slight skills gap due to the ever-changing nature
of the job itself, the environment and the technology. Therefore, the need
for a training partnership between the employee and the supervisor is what
makes the difference on whether or not bridging that skills gap is successful.
Additionally, it is important to have an assessment process in place from the
beginning that can evaluate what skills need to be addressed and how best to
address them, including possibly developing customized training around that
gap. That assessment process may come from the training provider or fall on the
supervisors since they work directly with the employees and need to be able to
evaluate where the lack of skills lies – is it knowledge- or qualifications-based, or
is it attitudinal and a behavior change is needed? This process will determine the
format and help the educators develop appropriate training techniques.
When it comes to bridging the skills gap, the best method is to use a combination
of different training formats based on the needs of the supervisor and employee.
The following are frequently-used techniques and can often overlap each other:
Instructor-led Formal Education
This is the most traditional training method and provides face-to-face
interaction between the instructor and the students. This type of training
should be interactive and highly participatory, facilitating adult learning.
By involving training participants in the content through a variety of
interactive activities, exercises and discussions, the employees are more
likely to retain and apply the skills learned in this setting. Not only are the
students learning from their own experience and growing their critical
thinking skills, but they can also draw on and learn from the experiences
of their fellow students.
One example that illustrates the benefit of this type of training is an exercise
students do individually and then as a group. In the exercise, individual
students are given a list of 20 items and asked to order the items from
most to least important if they were stranded in a challenging environment,
such as a desert or the moon. Then, after they complete it, they are asked
again to do the same exercise in groups. By doing it in small groups, they
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Training Techniques
for
Addressing
the
Skills Gap
By Melissa Asher, PMP, SPHR
