THE NEW INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Making Promises Employee Skills Can't Keep?

Imagine you book a table at a newly re-launched restaurant that now promises great food and an exceptional 5-star service. When you arrive, the Ma?tre d’ is rude, your waiter cannot answer questions about the menu and the food (which is pretty good) comes ridiculously late and the bill is high.

Would you return? Possibly not... Why? Because that business' promise was not fulfilled due to the competency and attitude of its staff. And this is the challenge that many corporations are facing today as they are forced to adapt their promise.

The 4th Industrial Revolution is changing customer expectations and buying habits. For many organizations (in particular IT, financial services and professional services) this has forced them to re-imagine their offer and promote new customer promises to stay profitable and relevant in a rapidly shifting, highly competitive landscape.

Sure, smart marketing may get them in the door but customer promises need to be reflected in customer experiences or you end up with customers who will 'give you a go', be underwhelmed by the way they are engaged with, and eventually take the business elsewhere.

A change in promise usually requires a change in the way staff engage with customers. Some people call these 'soft' skills or 'professional' skills. Whatever you call them, the fact is that the 4th Industrial Revolution with the heavy implementation of multiple emerging technologies (AI / digitization / automation) has made soft skills critical to the success of a business and individual (Deloitte Access Economics graphic below).

So why is traditional corporate learning and development falling short when it comes to developing the skills that are required in this new world order?

Firstly, there is a serious lack of awareness of team members’ professional skill gaps. Based on our recent global survey of companies with over 500 employees there is:

• No objective measurement of their staff skill gaps - Learning is based on gut feel, industry trends - "our competitors are doing it" - or management opinion. The latter is fine if managers truly know the competency of their staff. However, with many of our larger clients, the manager rarely sees their staff 'in action' and has little to no idea about their skill gaps.
• Not measuring skills effectively - asking someone via a survey what skills they lack is not a particularly dependable measurement of the skills they need.
• Measuring the wrong skills!

This last point is a big one (thus the exclamation mark). Measuring the skills a role requires today means that by the time you run any learning initiatives, those skills may no longer be relevant. If you are aiming a rocket at the moon, you need to focus on where the moon will be when you get there not where it is now. Get it?

How many companies run technical training for people on products that will be automated in the next few years when they really should be developing the skills those people will need once technology has made that part of their role obsolete?

Companies are spending a lot of money on learning and development that may be breeding dinosaurs.

This is not to say all training is inappropriate. There are some great programs out there that address the need of their participants.

However, we then come to the next challenge... Lack of implementation of new skills back in the workplace.

People rarely change habits of a lifetime just because they have attended a training course that shows them how to do it. People have a habit of gravitating back to their good ol’ bad old habits when back in the workplace.

I recall being sent on a time management course many years ago. At that time I had no idea of how disorganized I was. I literally planned nothing. I had no diary and never wrote a 'to do' list. I just had a desk covered with sticky notes. But I was blissfully unaware that this was the way I preferred to think. I had built up 'workarounds' to make up for my lack of organization. So when I attended the time management training, I agreed that it made sense in theory but fell right back to my old ways back at work. If only I knew then what I know today. I would have fought against falling back into those bad habits.

After 23 years in the training industry and profiling the thinking preferences of over 10,000 training participants, I have met a number of people who reflect my situation back then. People who need to learn skills that sit way outside their personal comfort zone. The technician who joined the company to be a technician, whose least preferred thinking preference is 'relational' but needs to develop customer engagement skill that requires high levels of empathy.

In summary, 4th Industrial Revolution and the disrupting effects of new technology mean that the future success of many organizations’ 'human capital' will rest heavily on individuals’ ability to effectively engage with internal and external stakeholders.

Current corporate learning is falling short of identifying future skills requirements. Often the learning that is deployed sits outside the employee's comfort zone due to their individual personal thinking preferences which results in the learned skills not being implemented... Which kinda defeats the purpose of investing in workforce learning right?

A more sophisticated and individualized approach to advancing each person based on their own skill requirements and preferences is required.

After 23 years of training and assessing the professional skills critical to future success, we have developed the world's first, intelligent online benchmarking tool that reports on skill gaps based on people's future role requirements. Add to this the world's leading thinking preference profiling tool, HBDI?, and you get a report on skill gaps and an indicator of where an individual's skill implementation challenges lie.

The result is FutureFit?, a powerful, cost-effective business tool which can be tailored to an organization's unique strategy and goals and is already been used by Fortune 500 companies globally.

If you would like to understand how future fit your organization and its people are, please contact me to arrange a free trial for your team.