We’re still talking about skills – and there’s a good reason for that

David Perring, September 2023

David Perring, Fosway Group’s Chief Insights Officer looks at the fourth infographic of five that make up this year’s exhaustive and peerless Digital Learning Realities research for 2023.

It’s difficult not to see skills and being a skills-based organisation being top of HR agendas

For the foreseeable future - about the next two years – the focus on skills is going to be here and it's going to become more of a foundational HR strategy. The reason - simply because there isn't enough talent available, and the available talent pools don’t have the in-demand skills.

Some of that is driven by demographics. By 2030, across the whole of the European Union there will be a shortage of roughly 50 million workers compared with 2010 because of the aging demographic. That's either a lot of automation or that's a lot of demand for people that's only going to grow. So, with a lack of people you need either need immigration to make up the shortfall, or you've got to develop skills and have high levels of automation. The true answer is likely a combination of those things.

With that in mind, it's difficult not to see skills being important when organisations can't find the people that they want.

Skills will become more granular as organisations ask more precise questions of 'who can do what work?'

But beyond the overriding skills question, what we may see is the next layer down over the next three or four years where people look at work as tasks. We'll see a transition from skills from being this global, bucket-like label towards more work-like tasks being the basic currency for organizing work. At the moment, skills tend still to be quite broad. The understanding of how complex or how proficient people can be is convoluted and not as accurate as we want. But, we're going to get to the point of asking; what tasks does somebody need to be able to do? And, from what I know about them, can I now assign them to those tasks, some of which might be automated? That's where we'll see things going.

For better or worse L&D see formal training as the mechanism to grow skills

When you need to get your workforce prepared for something new, what's the quickest way of doing that? E.g. when building a new skill, they always default to formal training as having the biggest impact on skills. And the next follow up beyond that one is put people in the classroom, in face to face training.

What's interesting at the other end of the spectrum is when you ask people what has the biggest impact on skills, the two bottom items in that list are online courses and digital learning resources. So, there's something in there, a healthy layer of scepticism about the ability of classic elearning to do a great deal; but also the importance of having a human touch, part of the blend to help people stay motivated and getting hands on to build skills and build proficiency at work, rather than thinking it's something that you can do outside of that.

What can digital learning do to help formal training? It's about extending some of the ability to practise and rehearse. And we can still be formal but also quite informal about it by using buddying and coaching; allowing people to practise and reverse difficult situations, this process gives us a sense of their readiness and probably builds their confidence to do work as well. That's going to be one of the key things where we can see digital learning helping more in the future; put me in a scenario, help me choose what the right options might be. Let me learn by doing, in a safe environment.

Some of that is about being able to navigate process. Sometimes it's about how you respond to different situations. The use of generative AI both to create those simulations or act as the provocateur in some of those conversations is only going to grow for the next couple of years.

The other side of formal training is what have people forgotten and what triggers they can get from other data sources that say, maybe my co-worker needs to know more about this. Maybe they’ve forgotten some of these things that we told them three months ago - probably already a significant loss.

That rate of decay means that we can keep them topped up just by giving them small nuggets, just to keep them at that level now. That could be an important uplift around what we do from a digital learning point of view as we look out to the coming two or three years. But ultimately, it's down to personalisation. That's what formal learning may not be able to do right is zero in on me, and help me make my next right choices about what goes in my brain.

Its not just tech skills that are in demand, it’s 'people skills' that business really want too

When we think about the priority skills, we think naturally that the things that businesses want are based around new technology - the ability to program or create AI or reengineer a particular tool so that it works in a particular way. And what's interesting based on this research is that whilst those technical skills are quite high, the things that are even higher are leadership and teamworking - it's a dose of reality that we all need a blend of skills to succeed. It's not just about having great programmers or being great at ‘digital’. What you also need is leadership and teamworking to bring those projects to fruition successfully. It's always easy to reduce everything down to just tech skills - that’s part of the innovation, of being in touch with the future. But, you’ve still got to make these projects happen. People always boil it down to wanting tech as that's what helps them transform. ou can have all the tech in the world; it'll still fall flat on its face if you don’t complement that with great change management.

To download the infographic

The latest Digital Learning Realities research infographics are free to download from our website.

https://www.fosway.com/research/next-gen-learning/digital-learning-realities-2023/

About Fosway

Fosway Group is Europe's #1 HR Industry Analyst focused on Next Gen HR, Talent and Learning. Founded in 1996, we are known for our unique European research, our independence and our integrity. And just like the Roman road we draw our name from, you'll find that we're unusually direct. We don't have a vested interest in your supplier or consulting choices. So, whether you're looking for independent research, specific advice or a critical friend to cut through the market hype, we can tell you what you need to know to succeed.

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