Smart skills investment brings success

Whether your are an enterprise, educational body or government, the reality is that one of the greatest assets you have are the skills of your people. In this new world, we all know now that work and learning can be location agnostic, which means that there are no barriers to skills acquisition or indeed skills loss. Furthermore if skills are truly an asset, shouldn't we be investing and managing them wisely?

It was an absolute pleasure to spend time in Brussels and understand how the European Commission is doing just this with the upcoming Year of Skills 2023. The question is how can we take this to a more granular level so that companies, universities and local government can ride this skills revolution and not be left behind?

1. Up skilling is a win win for companies - with 87% admitting they have a skills gap but don't know what skills they need, how are they investing wisely in learning? There is a huge thirst for skills acquisition by employees with 83% wanting to learn but for L&D to have the right impact and Skills ROI we need to know the starting point. (Answer: Skills Audit)
2. Empowering the learner - In most cases, companies either decide on what further learning courses are made available or they offer every type of course you can possibly think of which in itself can be overwhelming. Adoption, engagement and completion for a lot of L&D can be lower then expected. One of the greatest moves you can make as an employer is to provide the recommended learning engine to the employee based on the skills they wish to acquire and to let them actively manage their own skills acquisition journey. (Answer: Digital Skills Passport)
3. Producing employable graduates - Higher education can also benefit by assessing the skills gap across hard and soft skills of final year students and inviting employer partners into a skills mapping exercise that will give visibility on future pipeline and also see where curriculum development and further learning needs to be plugged in with limited lag time. (Answer: Skills Mapping)
4. Uncovering new talent - With 120 million people living in rural areas there is incredible untapped talent. Furthermore enabling remote working means uncovering talent that was unable to consider or afford the city office 9-5 model. They include regional unemployed, returning parents, people with mobility challenges, migrants, older people not ready to fully retire and so on. For many of these people with incredible potential there is a great digital divide which needs to be bridged first. (Answer: Integrated Recommend learning engine)
5. Connecting skills inclusively to opportunity - Learning as a stand alone is not enough and if we all agree that soft skills are playing a very important role in the working world then our matching ecosystems need to reflect this. Traditionally they have matched on key words, enabled unconscious bias from the first stage and created a lot of work for the hiring manager and stress for the jobseeker. Whether its skills matching employee to internal opportunity as they acquire new skills inside and outside of the workplace, student to alumni for mentoring, graduate to work place or indeed supporting transferrable skills to new industry it must be based on skills first matching that is anonymised. (Answer: Inclusive skills matching)

The team I have the pleasure to work with in Abodoo live and breath skills development and technology. Our belief is that everyone deserves the right to have a home "an abode" and to be able to work and learn "do" and this is possible in this new world of work and learning with the right support. This upcoming year will be really important for so many individual lives if we invest wisely in skills and ensure the technology and indeed taxonomy (next week's issue) is there to support inclusive skills development, acquisition, mapping and matching.

If you would like to receive more information on any of the Answers above you can DM me or indeed the team.

Have a wonderful day

Written by

Vanessa Tierney

CEO Abodoo

Abodoo is a skills mapping and inclusive matching white labelled software powering enterprise, education and government in maximising their skills development and investment with the Digital Skills Passport.