Harnessing skills intelligence to help plug the skills gap

The tech skills gap has been top of mind for modern organizations for years now but, as the worlds of technology and business intertwine more and more each day, up-to-date technical knowledge can be the difference between business success and falling behind competitors. 

A recent Forbes piece highlighted the ways in which the tech skills shortage is set to hamper the ambitions of organizations around the world. And while ChatGPT and its generative AI peers are being touted as a solution to this problem, there is still a need to nurture talent to achieve growth and innovation ambitions. 

Positioning the UK as a global tech leader

In the midst of this skills shortfall, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has made clear his plans to position the UK as a global tech leader, most notably as the home of AI regulation.

Without a doubt, the popularity of AI platforms is growing rapidly, with real implications for businesses. AI’s ChatGPT set a record for the fastest-growing user base when it reached 100 million monthly active users just two months after launching. In the workplace, these tools can increase productivity and efficiency by automating repetitive tasks and letting employees focus on higher-value work. They can foster enhanced creativity and innovation by assisting in brainstorming and ideation processes and generating novel solutions to complex problems.

However, pursuing “leadership” in AI, or any other disruptive technologies, still won’t overcome the immediate skills gap that the UK and other countries around the world are experiencing. According to online learning giant Coursera’s Global Skills Report, the UK ranks 64th in a table dominated by Europe, with Switzerland, Spain and Germany taking the top three places and the continent occupying eight of the top 10 positions. The US fares even worse at 78th.

If he wants to create an ambitious, tech-forward economy, Rishi is focusing on the wrong things. For businesses to find true confidence and direction, it is important to not just fill the gaps left in the organization, but to invest in maximizing the skills and certifications that employees do hold and using this intelligence to drive strategy.  

Increasing education and skills training

Training and education are essential, long-term approaches to combat the skills gap, but businesses need to look for more immediate strategies to handle today’s skills disparities.

Instead, by understanding the breadth of certifications that already exist within your organization, business leaders can unlock the power of knowing what skills lie beneath the waterline. Forming a vital piece of business intelligence, this data not only highlights the most pressing skills gaps, but can be used to guide and set new business strategies that competitors may not be able to pursue. With this approach, accurately understanding existing skills and certifications can determine potential and enable ambitious business.

Finding a way to accurately track skills and certifications

Organizations that understand the value of accurately tracking skills and certifications must contend with a multitude of moving parts. Among these, various data sources and the fluidity in how data can change, whether through natural churn or programmatic changes made by vendors, make certifications hard to track.

Managing the consistency of data input and ensuring that employees can view and amend their certification portfolio is a key challenge on the road to achieving true visibility, and maintaining organized, verified, and updated data requires a large amount of time.

That said, business intelligence is the key strategic driver for every modern organization, and skills intelligence is fast becoming an essential part of this equation.  Maintaining an accurate record of the technical certifications within the organization helps to determine new business opportunities, make smarter hiring choices, and maintain vendor program compliance.

Systal – a case in point

One organization that has overcome this skills intelligence challenge is global managed network and security service and transformation specialist, Systal Technology. This high growth company has many ITIL qualified and vendor certified experts within the organization and it holds many industry-leading accreditations. Systal is utilizing our certification tracking and skills intelligence solution, ProFusion, to help it meet its business, recruitment, and vendor strategies and combat the IT skills gap by having better visibility into what skills it does have across the organization. ProFusion helped Systal to unlock new potential by creating a single source of certification data from across 450 vendors, offering true visibility across skills and certification to ensure that overall business and recruitment strategies are achieved.

When certifications change, ProFusion automatically provides a single source of truth, making it easy for Systal to manage all certifications in one place. With a consolidated view of all certifications for each vendor, the platform offers 24 different data fields that track employees, certifications, currency, and any upcoming expiry dates, enabling Systal to proactively plan and recertify to stay one step ahead. Employees themselves are now able to add certifications that are not already in the portal. Why is that important?  Because on average employees have 40% more certifications than employers are aware of.

Additionally, employees must provide scanned evidence of their certifications, so from a compliance perspective Systal can prove accreditations. In a fast-changing world, the currency of the data that Systal now has access to is incredibly reliable; management can refresh every couple of weeks and always has an accurate picture.

Optimizing resources and budgets

Having all this intelligence and data at their fingertips has enabled Systal to plan more effectively and be more proactive about any skill gaps across the organization.  It is also much more scientific now about its recruitment plans and this means that learning and development and recruitment costs have been reduced, whilst Systal is optimizing its resources.

Looking to the future, there is no silver bullet to fix the skills shortage and boxing clever around skills, recruitment and learning and development plans is what is required for organizations to continue to grow and thrive and not be hampered in their plans by a lack of skills.