As we focus efforts on bridging higher-order soft and hard skill gaps, we need to urgently acknowledge and tackle the prevalent basic skills gap.

Introduction

The future of technology in workforce development is exciting. Driven by Covid training is moving online, it is becoming more accessible, affordable and a higher priority for HR, L&D and Talent managers.

However, having spoken with hundreds of companies in this space, I have one main worry about the future. I am worried that in our pursuit of in-demand intermediate and advanced hard and soft skills, we are neglecting something fundamental - basic skills. As we think about ways to upskill more people into AI engineer roles and turn more people into empathetic leaders, we are forgetting many people, from secretaries to CEOs, are still using two fingers to type, have never used a keyboard shortcut and still use paper notebooks to manage their diaries, finances and tasks.

This article first outlines what the hard and soft skill development emphasis in the distant and near future will look like. It then defines and highlights the importance of a range of often neglected basic skills that companies and workforce development startups should be investing more efforts into now. While they seem fairly unimportant, neglecting these skills and populations that need them the most can have a major negative impact on company output while fuelling the further rise in economic inequality.

1. The future of workforce development and the importance of hard and soft skills

I cannot wait to make workforce development technology investments in 2040

I'll be honest. I love gaining new knowledge and skills, but I'm not a huge fan of the process of acquiring them. While technology and experience make it easier, learning is still hard work. I can't wait for 2040 and to meet the founder that will pitch me the Matrix in real life startup. We will be able to choose from a selection of skills and knowledge modules, seamlessly plug a chord in the back of our heads and in 10 minutes have a brand new skillset. It is not that crazy of a vision when you realise that brain-to-machine interfaces are an up and coming thing.

Until 2040, there are a lot of problems and opportunities to keep us busy

Before the Matrix fantasy becomes reality, we will have to settle with less intrusive ways to develop new knowledge and skills. Many trends and statistics underline the urgency to act fast. Jobs are changing at a rapid pace and education is not keeping up. 65% of children entering school will be looking for jobs that do not exist today. If we don't act now, our global economy will suffer from $8.5btn in unrealised revenues due to a human talent shortage of more than 85m people. With so few technology startup breakthroughs in workforce development, there are many opportunities to focus on this problem that I cover in detail in my piece on How to Build a Unicorn in Workforce Development.

In the next decade we will see more tech training with a rise in focus on soft skills

This current decade will represent a renaissance for technology in workforce development. The previous decade planted the seeds for this movement. Companies like Cornerstone, Degreed and Edcast have paved the way for all employees to get access to learning content. Providers like Lynda and Pluralsight improved the quality of content and moved it online, while companies like Gloat and Lattice introduced new ways to unlock skills, manage and support talent.

This decade will mark a shift from enabling access to content and supporting management to ensuring training results in tangible hard and soft skills and positive, measurable results for both the company and employees. We expect to see more businesses focused on supporting the development of much needed hard skills in areas like programming, cloud computing, design and sales and soft skills like creativity, leadership, emotional intelligence, collaboration and time management.

2. The present of workforce development and the importance of basic skills

The current focus on hard and soft skills is neglecting the basic skills gap

Having more people with strong leadership skills and empathy and more experts in programming and artificial intelligence will play an important role in closing the skills gap and improving economic output. However, as we focus on the higher-order hard and soft skill needs, we must not forget the often neglected basic skills for the 21st-century employee in the technology-enabled workplace.

So what do I mean by basic skills?

Historically the general consensus has covered reading, writing and numeracy as basic skills covered through English and Maths in school. As technology has become part of our everyday life and the workplace demands have changed, we have failed to evolve and adopt a basic skills definition. Passing maths exams does not automatically translate into adding value to an employer through number analysis especially if one does not know how to use Excel. While trigonometry is a legal school requirement, something far more important like probability statistics is not. If it were, we'd be able to comprehend the notion that 99.9%+ of people never need trigonometry.

Basic skills of today's technology-enabled workforce environment should include a combination of hard and soft skills that a majority of employers and employees will agree are essential to the employee's day to day work, productivity and output, often agnostic of role and industry. The same way we have reached a consensus on how to define a school curriculum for languages and maths, we could do the same for the digitally savvy 21st-century employee. The Minerva Project has done some amazing pioneering work on this front through its 21st-century skills framework targeted towards students and through its pedagogy covers everything from very basic to highly advanced skills.

Why are basic skills relevant and important?

The skills gap problem is not just about who is going to take on the 85m vacant high-skill jobs that will exist if we don't change our current institutional and corporate education practices. The arguably bigger and simpler problem is how do we help the existing 3.5bn employees to be better at their current jobs, whatever jobs they are in or moving into.

Until we get computers to automate things like using themselves, writing, presenting, learning and task management, most people will be facing similar tasks throughout their day to day jobs. Improving and optimising the speed, accuracy and quality of how we perform these key routine tasks can provide huge boosts to productivity and outputs, free up time to learn more advanced skills which benefits both the employee and the employer.

3. An overview of some of the main basic skills and gaps

But do we really have a basic skills gap?

Most people that are reading this hear 'basic skills' and think - these are problems that other people face. Problems that frontline workers have. Problems that people without university degrees have. I believe that this is a much bigger problem that transcends university education, career roles and even seniority.

Before listing what I believe should be some of the new basic skills for the 21st century, it is useful to look at what we previously considered as basic skills and see how we were progressing against them. The results are shocking. Let's look at numeracy as an example. According to research from National Numeracy and KPMG, an incredible 49% of the UK's working-age population have the numeracy levels expected of primary school children. A quarter of the UK's working-age population would not be able to calculate what their salary would be if they got a 5% salary raise. 78% of the UK adults would struggle to answer the following question: "A TV has been reduced by 20% and now costs ￡280. What was the original price?" While I provide anecdotes and evidence whenever possible to justify my first pass at highlighting the new basic skills gaps below, it is worth going back to these striking numeracy statistics every time you are in doubt about the existence of a basic skills gap.

We need to also acknowledge how early we still are in digitising many parts of the workplace and the basic education needed for employees to use and make the most out of new essential software. While many that are reading this are tech savvy and fully in the cloud, many others are just now learning about the cloud and migrating their files online. While some are power users of up and coming software like Notion and Airtable, many others are still struggling with the basics of Google Docs and Spreadsheets. HR software companies like Personio are just now becoming unicorns given most SMEs still use online notes and tables to manage their HR functions.

What are some examples of basic skills and the gaps?

Before my foray into venture capital, I spent a lot of time working with local and central government. I also come from Bosnia which is at least a decade behind more developed countries when it comes to ICT. Both of these backgrounds have represented great sources of surprise, frustration and inspiration for the following basic skills gaps I have experienced over the years.

Typing fast. At a previous school where I was a governor, for each governor meeting my school would hire a consultancy that sends a note-taker. Usually two note-takers physically (pre-Covid) come. Both take handwritten notes as they cannot type fast enough. After the meeting, they collate and type up their notes that are sent to us a few weeks later. This isn't unusual. The average person types c.40 words per minute with most typing in the 20-45 wpm range. A trained person types c.70 wpm. (Curious where you sit? Take the test here.) Assuming the only typing you do is in sending e-mails, the average person can save a whole week of time by learning to type faster. When you factor in other writing, savings can go up to multiple weeks. While for younger generations that are born with computers, touch typing comes as second nature, this is often not the case for more senior employees. Think about what a CEO could do with 2 extra weeks of saved time if they just knew how to type fast.

Manipulating numbers. As a former strategy consultant, I was put on a short project to test an Excel model built by an expert independent contractor for a large UK corporate. I remember with excitement receiving the Excel that I was tasked to audit and the horror on my face when I realised that the contractor had hardcoded every single number in the 15 tab Excel file. I later found out they used a calculator for the entire analysis and Excel as essentially a 'table' to store the calculations. Gaps in fundamental knowledge of Excel are not new, you can read about them every day.

Using keyboard shortcuts. As an Excel nerd, I was in shock when I found out that a close friend was not using the function keys in Excel. Fine, I thought to myself - locking fields and checking formulas might not be a basic skill. A few weeks later I noticed that a relative was searching for a word in a document. They were scrolling through the document and manually looking for the word. I googled "How many people use the CTRL+F shortcut?". I found a 2011 article from the Atlantic showing that 90% of people don't use CTRL+F. While I hope more people today know what CTRL+F does, I am fairly sure that many people still don't know more than 5-10 keyboard shortcuts. Ballpark maths suggest that you could be wasting up to 2 weeks of your year because of this. 

Googling and fact-checking. If CTRL+F is something most people do not use, then it is no surprise that most people do not know what a hyphen, asterisk or colon do when doing basic search. Aside from discovering new information, search can play a role in validating existing information. It is so easy today to copy paste and google a suspicious e-mail to find out that it is fake, yet Nigerian prince e-mail scams still exist (and make $700k per year) and 90% of cyber data breaches happen due to human error most commonly caused by phishing. While fact-checking falls into the remit of higher-order 'critical thinking', successfully avoid major scams really should be a basic skill.

E-mailing. I have a complicated surname - Barosevcic. Despite Google's name autocomplete functionality, amazingly still in 50% of e-mails I get from customer service responses, my surname is mistyped. In the UK and US educational systems, we put a lot of emphasis on writing. One would think that by the time we enter the workforce we are confident writing machines. If we can get an A in a Shakespeare paper we should be able to successfully write anything? Unfortunately not. Grammarly's 2019 State of the Workplace report shows that 3 out of 4 people are worried about the meaning of their e-mails being misunderstood, 1 out of 2 are concerned about their e-mails being too long and 1 out of 3 have had to run their e-mails by their supervisors before being comfortable sending.

Paying attention to detail. 'Attention to detail' is probably one of the most cited basic skills on a CV. While we are all attention to detail experts on paper, ironically 9 out of 10 CVs contain typos while more than 60% have more than 5 errors. Attention to detail is not easy - it took me 2 years to develop the skill to make a Powerpoint slide that doesn't have an error in it and I challenge every young confident freshly minted strategy consultant to make a slide under pressure in their first year without making a mistake. While a slide mistake can perhaps be forgiven, attention to detail can have more concerning implications. Only last week I spent 10 minutes arguing with my doctor on Babylon (online doctor app) that I wasn't an alcoholic. In the end, we realised that they accidentally clicked on the health profile of another man with a Slavic sounding name who has not been treating his liver too well.

Above are just some basic skills I believe we need to invest more effort in at the workplace. Each one of these skills has advanced forms. Manipulating numbers can range from using SUM formulas to writing macros and building financial models. E-mailing can range from a short customer service response to a complex strategic negotiation e-mail. As we think about the higher-order skills, it is important we acknowledge and first ensure employees are supported with the foundations and basics.

4. Ideas and advice for founders

Basic skills can be a difficult market to serve, but it is not impossible

Building a unicorn business based on the premise of helping people type faster might be difficult to imagine. You can just go on Udemy and take the 'Learn to type correctly' course and learn to become a fast typist with less than a day of practice. Similarly, there are thousands of great free courses, including on Youtube that can help people learn Excel from the basic skills through to mastery. Finally, many employers might not find employees e-mailing quality, keyboard shortcut usage and googling skills to be major pain points worth paying for.

While difficult, building a large successful business against the premise of supporting development of basic skills is possible. With the existence of Microsoft's spell check, no one thought it would be possible to build a business based on the value proposition of doing a slightly better and more comprehensive job than Microsoft. Then came Grammarly which proved everyone wrong and became an essential tool for advanced grammar correction in e-mails and supporting general writing. In other basic skills fields, while a lot of training is freely available, the basic skills gap still persists. This shows that it is not access to content that is necessarily the problem, as innovations in format and channels could deliver much greater impact with much better reach.

When one rethinks basic skills in the context of employee onboarding a much bigger market category opens up. Each employer has a set of fundamental basic software that they use and want their employees to be proficient in. Software manuals and Q&A forums often just do not work, but WalkMe's approach does. Through a very simple premise of helping employers more effectively upskill new staff through software adoption and digital transformation with basic step by step guides, WalkMe has over the last decade raised more than $300m in financing serving more than 1,800 enterprises.

Couple basic skills training with existing core solutions

If you are not sure that your solution can act as a standalone business focused on basic skills, think about coupling basic skills training with your core training. By ensuring your customers have strong foundations in basic skills like searching for information, managing time, knowing how to learn effectively you could be seeing significantly better results with your core training. Basic skills training could also represent a good foot in the door strategy for upselling more advanced training. The bar today when it comes to basic training is not high. Many basic skills training programmes today are administered by charity or local government entities through face to face formats (through websites like this) and are often aimed at job seekers, English as a Second Language populations or apprentices.

Focus on populations that will benefit the most

It might not always be the case that you can create a venture business around just one target demographic in need of basic skills. There are however many target demographics that could benefit from basic skills solutions that could significantly help improve their productivity and free up their own and others time to focus on other important tasks and develop new skills. Below are three examples.

Secretaries and personal assistants. In the US alone there are 4 million secretaries and personal assistants. On the grand scale of job complexities, this job can be performed well with some strong basic skills while having a large impact on the people that are supported. The Harvard Business Review strongly argues in favour of more executive assistants who can free up manager time to earn more revenue for the business. This job however is difficult to hire for (82% of US employers expressed difficulties in finding a PA) and has horrible retention with most PAs changing their jobs more than once a year.

Government employees. 450 million people globally work in government. It is by far the largest sector, it is incredibly important, yet it has significantly less funding compared to top corporates to attract and invest in talent. While the sector is difficult to serve, it is a large white space that I doubt the current large workforce development technology providers will serve any time soon. Currently, it is much more likely you will find a government entity paying a lot of money to Accenture to help upgrade their Window's operating systems, than to Degreed to help employees enable access to basic skills development. 

Service workers. Lastly, another often neglected segment represents people in service jobs. In the US alone there are more than 100m workers in private service-providing industries. While all we read about in the news is about the shortage of advanced tech talent, we neglect that the majority of global jobs and growth in jobs is driven by the services industry. As 'technology continues to eat the world' and new software is rolled out across various services industries, we need more people in these industries with basic skills. Major service industries that are often neglected by high profile workforce development technology startups include trade and transport, health services, leisure and hospitality. If you are a nurse that doesn't know how the effectively store and manage online patient records or a hotel manager that doesn't know how to post an effective property description through Booking.com or communicate with customers via e-mail you will be left behind.

Final thoughts

As we think about the impending skills gap and focus on important, advanced soft and hard skills we want our employees to have, let's not neglect the basic skills. While they appear to be minor gaps, they carry huge potential to help improve productivity, effectiveness and quality of work. Failure to address basic skills cap can turn into big handicaps for employers and increase inequality among employees.

Odds are many of you reading this article will not feel like they have major basic skills gaps, however, do not be complacent. We are still in the very early days of technology in the workplace. Technology is rapidly progressing and the bar of basic skills is changing. What today is considered to be a desirable hard skill, tomorrow might easily become a basic skill.

Have any views on the concept of 'basic skills'? Have ideas on specific skills that should be considered basic for the 21st century technology-enabled workplace? Building a company focused on helping solve the basic skills gap? Running L&D and Talent functions at a large corporate and would like to discuss this concept and the work we are doing around workforce development? If any of these are true, would love to hear from you! Just leave a comment or send me a direct message.

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