Why you can’t wait to build a culture of learning

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Leaders recognize the skill gap problem, but aren’t acting

So many leaders truly believe that there is a skill gap crisis, and that without sufficient upskilling beginning now, people won’t keep up with the future of work. However, many of them are not sufficiently motivated to take action to solve the problem. Perhaps they don’t realize it’s solvable. Perhaps it seems too overwhelming to tackle, especially because the gaps grow larger every day. Perhaps they think the status quo will magically resolve the crisis. It won’t.

In a 2019 McKinsey Global Survey, nearly nine in ten executives and managers say their organizations either face skill gaps already or expect gaps to develop within the next five years. Although most respondents say their organizations consider it a priority to address skill shortages, only 1/3 have begun reskilling efforts.

A solution is available and ready to execute

The solution is to create a culture of learning now, when there is time to do something about the skill gap problem before it’s too late. Leaders have to understand that the cost of doing nothing is too great.

The Self-Directed Learning Engine™ (SDLE) is only a tool in that solution, along with informal learning that provides people with the ability to learn while they work. Yes, it's another system. But it’s also the only “empowerment system” you are likely to have. Both your Talent Management System and the LMS are for compliance. There is not enough time for push. You need to drive pull. That means you need an empowerment system that pulls the right formal learning options from your LMS, together with experiential and collaborative informal learning options that can close gaps in skills of the future.

Most organizations suffer from unfilled positions resulting from job seekers that don’t have the right skills. The World Economic Forum and McKinsey & Company both agree that the solution is developing the skills of your existing employees to move into those positions with career planning tools like the SDLE.

If your existing systems were working, would you have growing skill gaps?

While you can’t push this concept onto leaders, if you believe it to be true, do you have any responsibility to help organizational leaders understand the cost of doing nothing before it’s too late? At least then they can make an informed decision to act or not.

ATD asked me to write a blog post for their certification programs and the below is a snippet from it that I thought might be helpful when leading that conversation.

The World Economic Forum predicts that employees will need an average of 101 days of reskilling and upskilling in the period leading up to 2022 because the core skills required to perform most jobs will change by 42%.

It’s just not possible to formally train as fast as people need new skills. With the speed of change, skill gaps are growing, while time available for training is practically non-existent. So, if we don’t shift from “training” to “learning[1]”, these are the 6 quantifiable impacts of skill gaps we can expect. (Each of them can be quantified for your organization.)

• Loss of productive time

  • If you don’t have the skills to do your job, it takes you longer. You have to figure it out.  You may have to ask someone to help you do it, which will also take up their time.

• Long job vacancies

  • Nearly 60% of U.S. employers have job openings that stay vacant for 12 weeks or longer. The average cost HR managers say they incur for having extended job vacancies is more than $800,000 annually. CareerBuilder survey

  • Having long job vacancies means that someone, or several people, are doing the work of the person who is not there. That means that the person or people taking on the extra responsibilities are not doing either job 100%, and they are stressed, overworked, and potentially burned out.

• Excessive turnover

  • Research now shows that the No. 1 reason people quit their jobs is the “inability to learn and grow”. 2019 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends: Leading the Social Enterprise – Reinvent with a Human Focus

  • PwC calculates turnover costs as 1.5 x salary

• Loss of competitive advantage

  • If people leave because of lack of development, they will often go to your competition. Not only do you lose their contribution, but your competition gains it – a double whammy.

• Lack of engagement

  • If you don’t feel like the organization is investing in you, you are less likely to be engaged.  That lack of engagement impacts lots of things. According to Gallup, that’s higher absenteeism and turnover, and lower productivity, sales, customer metrics, and profitability.

• Lack of innovation

  • Recruiting guru Dr. John Sullivan places the loss from missing out on a single game-changer, purple squirrel or innovator at over $1 million each.

  • Without skills, including skills for what’s coming next, there will be a deficit in people being able to be innovative.  Innovators are those who are highly skilled and have foresight. You need them to help you prepare for and deliver what comes next.

 Therefore, as a result of not having a learning culture, you’re going to have significant skill gaps… and one or more of each of these significant impacts. So, ask yourself these questions:

• What if all our best, most innovative people end up at our competitors?

• What happens if one of these problems exists at our company?

• What happens if ALL of these problems exist?

• What happens if they’re issues for us, but not our competition? What happens then?

A culture of learning, that puts people in charge of their development with personalized learning, can eliminate that.

But if you don’t agree, you’ll want to become ok with our inability to meet objectives. Here’s what we need to tell investors. Here’s what we need when we lose 40% of our staff. Here’s what we need when people can’t do the work. Let’s build a plan for when that happens.

Your next steps for driving action

• Ask your leaders if they believe there’s a problem. Ask them if they know the size of the problem. Without that, how can they take action?

• If you want to create a sense of urgency with leaders, use our business case for creating a culture of learning, which helps you quantify all the costs we described.

• Present the business case to them, and ask the critical questions we list above.

• If you don’t already have an empowerment system, one that quantifies the size of the skill gap, drives closure of gaps, measures the change in gaps, and gets employees to embrace “pull”, invest in one, and learn more about ours

These steps mirror the recommendations McKinsey & Company promotes in their Feb 2020 survey results: Beyond hiring: How companies are reskilling to address talent gaps.

[1] We define “learning” as learning to do a task or skill required for the job. Knowledge acquisition isn’t learning. Learning is when you apply knowledge such that you can “do” something.