In my last Insight, I explained how workforce education helps a company keep its competitive advantage.
Typically when I get calls from companies, many times it’s because there is some pain going on. The company is having an issue and they’re looking for a quick fix.
This is unfortunate, in my opinion. I’d like to keep companies from looking at workforce education as a “quick fix.”
Oftentimes, the company tells me they have an issue going on and they want to do communication or team-building. When I hear this, red flags go up for me. So I really try to dive down into the issue a little bit more and find out what exactly the company is trying to fix.
Although quick fixes are often necessary—and I do, on occasion, provide quick fixes for the companies I work with—I find it’s better to get to the root of the problem and use workforce education as a long-term strategy for overcoming issues.
Steps You Can Take
In order to make workforce education effective at your organization, you need to stay on track with your company’s strategic view and make sure you’re using your resource dollars for education in the proper light. You need to make sure you’re looking at it from a much broader scope than you have been in the past.
It’s not just determining what training skills gaps your company has or thinking about the types of training opportunities you want to offer. It has to go beyond that.
Companies definitely need to continue down the path of identifying the competencies they need in order to be successful, and then finding ways to deliver avenues—such as education or on-the-job training—to employees to help close some of the skills gaps.
At the same time, companies have to embed in their workforce education plans and avenues for addressing some of the generational gaps through knowledge transfer.
For example, a company needs to ask itself, “How do we get the 20 years of knowledge moved over from the retiring generation to the generation that’s coming into the workforce?” Because they’re not going to have the advantage of long-term employees that are there for years and years once the Boomers retire and the younger generations come in.
So the transfer of knowledge is going to have to become part of the business’ workforce education plans, as well.
An Example
I recently received a call from a customer that was in one of those pain-point areas I was talking about above, and they were looking for a quick fix.
I spent some time talking to the customer about what it was they wanted to get from their education plans. I asked them to look six months from now to determine what they wanted their employees to be doing differently.
What the company asked me to do was come in and conduct a two-hour team-building activity. They thought this team-building activity would fix all the broken trust with the team and some of the conflict that had surfaced because of the trust issues.
So we talked about some options that they had and what could be expected as a result of a quick fix. Sometimes when you use a quick-fix to deliver something to employees, the message you send is that management is listening. On the other hand, the down side could be that the true problem is not addressed and you will not achieve a long-term fix to the problem.
What I ended up doing for this company was I conducted some team-building and we did have some good dialog with the team. But overall, this team-building didn’t address the skills gap that was causing all the problems to begin with.
I continued to work with this company to put together a leadership curriculum that helped address the skills gaps that the leaders within the company were experiencing at each of the company’s office locations.
The new training curriculum addressed some of the skills gaps with the leaders, as well as connected the training to the employee performance reviews.
Organizations that remain competitive are going to be organizations that are able to adapt their talent management practices to include both retaining older workers, as well as transferring those workers’ knowledge to the younger generations. This alone can help close some of the skills gaps that are present.
When new employees come into your organization, there will be certain competencies you are going to want them to have that they might not have learned through their traditional education. And the best way to remain competitive is to continue along the path of education and mentoring employees. It has to be part of your plan moving forward if you’re going to continue to be successful as a company with so many different generations in the workforce at a given time.