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How HR leaders can ensure they are recruiting and training employees with the right skills

In last month’s newsletter, I talked about the importance of understanding which skills leaders need to add to their workforce to plan for the future.

I highlighted how soft skills – like leadership, collaboration, and critical thinking – are the most common in-demand skills of the future. These are the human-centric skills that organizations will need to add to their workforces as technology automates more mundane, repetitive tasks that computers are frankly better at.

While these skills broadly encompass what workforces need for the future, it is still true that each and every role within an organization will require a unique mix of skill sets for optimal employee performance.

For many HR and hiring managers, the task of identifying which skills a role requires has previously been left to desk research, understanding of which skills those roles have required in the past, and individual knowledge of the role.

This process has worked in the past, but now as the pace of tech adoption and implementation accelerates, HR leaders are needing to ensure the skills they are looking for among candidates and teams within a role are updated to reflect the changing nature of work.

So how can HR leaders ensure they are recruiting and reskilling existing employees with the most up-to-date, relevant, in-demand and future proofed skills for each role?

The latest addition to the Faethm platform is a market-driven skills ontology that equips HR leaders, hiring managers, and business leaders with the insights they need to ensure they are building a workforce with the right skills to get the job done.

The platform now includes job profile summaries which feature a list of the top twenty most in-demand skills of every job within the workforce. Top skills are broken into two categories: skills frequency and specialized skills.

Firstly, skills frequency is based on the number of job ads in which the skill has appeared, and can therefore be directly correlated to how in-demand the skill is. If we take ‘Human Resources Managers’ as an example of a role, we can see that the top three most frequent skills are leadership (appearing in 69% of job postings), team management (36%), and relationship management (28%).

Top Skills for Human Resources Managers (Skills Frequency):

 

Top 20 Skills

Specialized skills, on the other hand, highlights how unique to a job, or specialized for that job, a skill is in comparison to all other jobs. These are the skills that are specific to the individual role and ones that will be important to look out for in roles where special skill sets are required. 

For example, if we look at HR Managers again, specialized skills include team management (appearing in 26% of job postings), legislation (23%), and performance management (19%).

Top Skills for Human Resources Managers (Specialized Frequency): 

Top 20 skills for HR Manager

 

With this data to hand, HR managers and business leaders can be sure that they’re not only hiring new team members with the specific skills they need to thrive in a role, they can also implement upskilling and reskilling programs that are specifically targeted to each role their workforce demands.

The top skills summary is also a helpful tool for leaders eager to identify transferable skills among employees who are looking to transition from one area of a business to another due to tech automation or changing demand.

The ‘pathways’ tool in the job profiles section identifies which job pathway an employee in one area of a business could transition to if their role is at risk of automation, displaying roles and the level of automation they could face in a five year time horizon.

HR Managers, for example, have strong job pathways for worker compensation analysts, fundraising managers, and product development managers – with the latter having a 0% automation rate.  

As tech adoption increases and skills required shift at pace, it will be more important than ever for business leaders to understand which skills are needed most and whether existing employees can transition to other roles within an organization.

For those wanting to be confident that they have the right skills at the right time for the right role, it is vital to ensure they understand which skills are needed to meet demand.

Faethm's future of work predictive analytics is recognised globally as a world first. Contact us today for a demo of the platform.