Today, every industry is affected by the talent shortage. It is increasingly difficult for companies to find great people – and in the numbers required. A lack of technical and interpersonal skills across the board is hurting industry. According to a 2019 study by the Learning & Work Institute, the UK skills shortage will cost the country £120 billion by 2030, with a lack of 2.5 million skilled workers. While these figures are frightening, solutions do already exist to remedy them. What if we told you that it was possible to anticipate these needs without having to outsource your talent search? You can reduce your talent shortage by focusing on the professional development of your employees and internal mobility. Not to mention, you save time and money by avoiding having to integrate new employees.
Enhance your human capital with internal mobility
Workforce Planning involves recruitment and internal mobility – particularly with skills benchmarks. By taking inventory on employee skills, HR can rely on human capital to develop the company’s competitiveness. You can make accurate predictions to anticipate and plan for the future by mapping the diverse talent available, including both hard skills and soft skills. It’s an excellent way for any company to enhance their human resources by including them directly in the development and achievement of its objectives.
For internal mobility to be effective within the framework of Workforce Planning, HR must anticipate future needs by deploying tools and processes that offer employees tangible benefits.
Take stock of internal skills
Internal mobility requires significant planning in advance. Particularly, making an inventory of skills and detecting potential among employees, all collected in the form of data that can be analysed. This is necessary to remain up to date and agile while aligning strategic direction with HR and hiring decisions. Here are some of the effective tools for establishing a database:
- Professional interviews: these allow employees to reflect on and formalise their wants in terms of professional development. This is when it is possible to identify training needs and desire for mobility.
- Annual interviews: these are ideal for taking stock of the past year and highlighting objectives for the year to come. It will be possible to identify an employee’s potential, discuss their strengths and areas for improvement, as well as assess their overall satisfaction and ambitions. Following the annual interviews, training plans can be implemented for the employee’s professional development.
- Staff review: this is the moment when management and HR meet to discuss performance and actionable moves. This makes it possible to have a global view of all the internal talent and to determine if the company’s objectives can potentially be met by the skills of current employees.
In best practice, HR teams centralise this data via a single database: enabling preparation for changes to come, either in the sector or specific professions. A digital database is of course most desirable to combine skills and positions that need to be filled with recruitment policies, training, internal mobility, etc.
Focus on developing current employees
Offering employees the opportunity to augment their skills and develop new ones is a good way to limit staff turnover, increase employee engagement and loyalty. Fewer departures and higher job satisfaction in turn will enhance your employer brand.
Soft skills in the face of change
Psychometric tests during recruitment are becoming more commonplace, but they are also an asset for career planning and offering internal mobility possibilities to your employees. Thanks to the science of soft skills, HR and hiring teams are able to know in advance which positions an associate can flourish and excel in. On top of that, you are also able to strengthen every individual’s commitment by clearly understanding their expectations.
With the speed at which technology progresses, companies are facing the obsolescence of many skills their employees have relied on, for short or long periods of time. It is critical to ensure that employees have the soft skills necessary to acquire new hard skills that will be required of them in the future.
Machine learning democratises internal mobility
Some employees are looking for development opportunities: sometimes by-passing HR consultation for initial scoping of possibilities. Through A.I., employees can access and apply for internal opportunities all on their own. For HR and Talent Acquisition teams, it is possible to make decisions based on precise algorithms that take into account the technical know-how and soft skills of each potential candidate internally. And that’s not all: by making their profile accessible, employees can also be presented opportunities by A.I. that they would never have thought to seek out. The same goes for management, who may discover profiles they would not have considered otherwise.
Internal mobility is a way for companies to avoid integration errors connected to external recruitment. Every company can gain by taking an interest in developing its human capital. Encourage talent to stay and grow, discover new talent through professional development and increase Quality of Working life (QWL). As employees attach more and more importance to their work environment and atmosphere, it reminds us that there is a strong link between productivity and nurturing our people.
