4 Ways To Combat Skills Gaps In Your Workforce

Modern businesses face a number of common challenges and in a new series of informative articles, we will be tackling the big issues affecting a wide range of sectors. To start with, we’d like to explain a few ways that businesses can combat skills gaps/shortages.

According to search.co.uk, “three-quarters of businesses are impacted by skills shortages” and it costs businesses over £6.3bn each year due to employing temporary staff.

What is a Skills Gap or Shortage?

A skills gap or shortage can be described as an issue which occurs when your current workforce doesn’t have the correct skills required for a particular role, task or project. This can be anything from people skills to hard technology skills. The top sectors affected by skills gaps include Engineering, Construction, Finance, Healthcare, Industrial and others.

How can I reduce a Skills Shortage?

There are a number of ways to reduce skills shortages but one useful and cost-effective method is to utilise digital solutions to achieve your goals.

You will find a variety of approaches listed below:

Assess Your Approach To Recruitment

If you’re struggling to source the right candidates for a specific role or specialism, you may want to re-evaluate your approach to recruitment. If you were to create your own platform for potential candidates to apply and be evaluated, what would that look like?

You can build something completely bespoke by choosing the right digital solutions, allowing you to oversee the whole process and include aspects which are most important to you and your business.

If you were to use WordPress for example, your team could manage both your main website and your recruitment platform easily, by using WordPress Multisite. This would enable your team to manage both sites from the same central dashboard that they’re used to.

Make Training More Accessible

Another great method to reduce a skills shortage, is to offer training opportunities to your existing team members. Depending on your sector or the desired skill, there may even be an opportunity to secure funding from the Government or other sources such as the CITB etc.

Creating an online training portal (or integrating an existing solution) for your employees can be an excellent way to make training more accessible, while encouraging a productive and empowering culture. This can often lead to better staff retention and provides more opportunities for recognition within your company.

An online portal for staff can also add value to your business by improving internal communications, increasing productivity and creating a secure place for your team to provide feedback or report issues.

Promote Flexible Approaches To Work

It’s no secret that we enjoy remote working here at Filter but we have our reasons, there are many different benefits which come from hybrid or fully remote working.

Working from home allows colleagues to have a better work-life balance, and in most cases allows them to fully focus with minimal interruptions (compared to a busy office space). We find that this vastly improves productivity and allows companies to access an almost limitless talent pool, as people don’t need to commute to a physical office location.

This opens up more options for both the company and candidates looking for their next role, enabling businesses to recruit someone with the required skills or the potential to learn.

Automate Where Possible

Introducing automation may sound daunting or complicated but it can be such a simple process, with valuable benefits for your workforce.

For example, if your company receives a lot of similar enquiries about your products or services, you could implement an FAQ platform or add a chat bot to your website. This should cover the majority of questions and then give back a good amount of time to your sales/admin team.

Automation can be utilised by most departments in some way, to eliminate repetitive tasks and increase efficiency. The time saved by automating those tasks can then be used for training and development opportunities instead.

If you think a digital solution could benefit your business or improve a skills gap, our dedicated team can help. We have a proven track record when it comes to providing outstanding digital services.

If you’d like to speak to a member of our team, please make sure to get in touch to organise a convenient time to chat.

If you’d like to see more news articles but you’re short on time, why not sign up to our newsletter to receive a quarterly digest of our most recent posts.

You can also hear more from us by following our CEO Oliver Morrison on LinkedIn or by following our company page.