The talent war has turned to drought: Three steps to ensure your business survives

In Australia, there are currently around 400,000 positions that need filling — and no new overseas talent. It’s a challenge facing every business… or is it an opportunity to rethink skill development and hone the experience of your workforce and talent pool?

Finding the right person, with the right experience, at the right time, is becoming more complex. What’s the problem? What skills do we have? Does that skill have a name yet? Who else could help? Are they available? Is there a contract in place?

These are all questions that keep business owners and entrepreneurs up at night, and with good reason.

The ‘war on talent’ has turned to a drought

Although Australia’s unemployment rate is falling (4.6% in July), this doesn’t tell the full story for businesses facing their own talent crisis.

Pre-pandemic, hiring new talent was already fiercely competitive. Skilled vacancies were around 200,000, and candidates with digital skills were particularly hard to come by (often imported and/or expensive).

Combine that challenge with over half our country’s workforce already in urgent need of upskilling or reskilling, and our education system struggling to deliver enough skilled graduates. Australia had entered a major talent drought. Then the pandemic hit.

Now deep into the pandemic and with our borders still closed, companies are being forced to develop existing staff or look to pools of untapped talent to meet their growth needs.

The companies doing this successfully are the ones working together.

Three steps to survive the talent dought

1. Shine a light on your existing talent

   Too often, an employee’s expertise is defined by their job title, or at best their previous couple of job titles. Look past the job title and allow employees to highlight the breadth and depth of their expertise.

   Not often do colleagues really get to understand the journey of one of their co-workers — the skills and expertise, the passions and insights, the failures and lessons learnt that make up all of us. But its these individual experiences that are the gold nuggets in any organisation.

   Unlocking and spreading this intimate knowledge and understanding can not only make the business smarter but also build a more connected and engaged culture.

2. Get closer to your ‘business partners’ and work together on the challenge

   Most businesses today have very integrated go-to-markets, stitching together capabilities and services from a range of different organisations to make their business hum! Start sharing your talent needs with those organisations you are closest with, that also complement your own skills (think suppliers, technology providers, other SMEs).

   Each of these organisations have their own specific areas of core competence that you can tap into and vice-versa. Each organisation getting closer to the other, building intimacy and understanding and lifting the capability of all.

   Leading organisations are forming small coalitions and allowing their employees to share expertise to tackle common challenges such as:

   • Lifting digital literacy in middle and senior management;
   • Providing cross-industry mentoring and support for women in leadership roles; and
   • Accelerating industry knowledge for early in career employees.

3. Engage and incentivise your workforce to share their expertise with others

   People are naturally collaborative — especially when it comes developing skills and helping others do the same. We tend to be much better at it in our personal lives, each curating a network of unofficial advisors on a multitude of areas from cooking and gardening to sport.

   When these exchanges do happen at work, you often see and much more engaged and effective employee. Rather than just spontaneous or impromptu, exchanges like these should be encouraged, nurtured and rewarded, whether internal or external.

   Individual development discussions can include a component on an employee’s engagement with their peers, whether that be providing expertise or reaching out to someone for help. Broader business reviews can shine a light on the person-to-person sharing between organisations and the associated impact.

Technology advances enabling businesses to “upskill on demand”

This new approach of micro-learning both within and between organisations is emerging thanks to technology innovations in peer-to-peer learning (part of the massive global investment pouring into the $500 billion digital learning market). 

While companies like BurningGlass-Emsi, LinkedIn and Seek continue to gather huge amount of data on the global job market and evolving skill needs, it’s their partnerships with a growing ecosystem of tech startups that is providing simplified access to and insights of this data directly to business owners. And this changes the learning game for just about every Aussie business owner.

The Experience Exchange (TEX), Cyberseek or Dice, for example, offer insights around in-demand skills, job market data or career progression options straight from their platforms.

At TEX, we allow employees to connect with others who can support them to bridge their skills gaps, which means: 

• Businesses curate the organisations they wish to work with;
• Smart matching and AI finds the “right person” at the “right time”;
• Integrated calendars handle the logistics;
• Aggregated reporting tracks the effectiveness at a community level and how skills are evolving over time; and
• A business owner gets their people upskilled with very little effort or downtime.

This ongoing exchange between colleagues upskills and evolves the community, strengthens your business partnerships but also builds a sustainable culture of learning, preparing your business for future challenges.

Your priorities align with the human needs of your staff

“Humans need three basic things in order to be content. To feel competent at what they do, to feel authentic in their lives and to feel connected with others.” — Self Determination Theory, Edward L Deci

The unique learning that occurs when two people come together and work through a challenge, I believe, is the answer to the talent drought and skills challenge many businesses face. More than that, it provides the crucial, much-needed sense of belonging and support that we could all use right now.