Critical skills are essential to the success of any company, after all your people are your biggest asset. Skills are the talents and abilities of employees, managers, and leaders to accomplish company goals and support your organisation to win in the marketplace. But it is not always easy for organisations to know and identify what skills their employees need to strive in the business and drive growth. HR leaders are in a unique position to assist decision makers with identifying the critical skills organisations need to succeed and what individuals and teams may need those skills.

The skills gap in today’s labour market is a real problem and is one of the biggest challenges faced by human resources departments. Businesses lacking employees with crucial skills may find themselves struggling to achieve set goals in a very competitive market. Some common critical skills organisations lack could be:

Thought leadership – where companies have employees and management that are intellectual and creative and possesses the capability of creating new, thought-provoking ideas that move a company forward. This person is also skilled in motivating and supporting team members and staff.

Analytical problem solving – where employees and leaders are able to see the issue before them that prevent efficient production or poor customer service and can find solutions by gathering and interpreting information in a smart manner.

Technical skills – where an individual is experienced and can adapt in the function of their specific role so that they can perform efficiently and effectively.

According to Gartner, 64% of managers don’t think their employees are able to keep pace with future skills needs. Whether these skills fall under soft or hard skills, it is important to determine what skills the company require for success and work to develop those skills in the organisation.

To first identify if your organisation is lacking soft or hard skills in your staffing, you need to understand the differences between soft or hard skills and how they benefit the organisation.

Soft skills are skills that assist with a person’s ability to be productive and effective worker and team player in the workplace. Sometimes being related to personality, these skills are transferable across all levels of work and positions.

These skills benefit organisations with:

• Increased engagement

• Increased work ethic

• Stronger professional relationships

• Better teamwork

• Company growth

Hard skills are technical skills that benefit a person with their performance at the specific role and industry they work in. Since hard skills are acquired from formal training or education, they are more specialised such as analytical skills, computer skills or industrial and manufacturing skills.

These skills benefit organisations with:

• Increased efficiency

• Greater productivity

• Stronger employee satisfaction

• Company growth

To best perform skill identification of what skills the business could be lacking, HR leaders first want to understand the strategy of the business they are in, as Dr, Jaclyn Lee explores in this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. They should ask business owners to identify what are the organisation’s goals. Once those goals are identified, it is the job of HR leaders to evaluate where the company is falling short on those goals and how HR can assist by finding what critical skills should be explored that could assist with company objectives.

Once they are aligned with the business strategy, the HR professional will want to leverage their people analytics teams to discover what the skills distribution is within the company and where there is a surplus or a lacking of necessary skills. They can also consider, according to Rick van Echtelt the impact those skills will have on business.

“I think what the next step will be is that skills will be aligned more with impacts. What I mean with that is for example, some skills can impact turnover, some skills can impact on reduce costs or risks and some skills will impact on safety.”

After HR leaders identify the human skills that are lacking, they then determine the best means to acquiring those skills to benefit the company. For hard skills, they can investigate external means of acquiring those skills from people by studying the labour market and opening positions in the business. Or if it might be soft skills that are missing in the business, the HR leader can turn internally to develop the skill sets of their employees with extended training programs.

What is important, is for you, the HR leader to build trust with decision makers and be recognised as experts in your field, as Patrick Coolen explains. The human or employee experience should always be at the forefront of all that you do.

How can we bring the Human from HR into the business

As the saying goes, don’t forget the “H” in HR, basically meaning that HR is about the human factor in business and that it is humans that make or break a business.

So, companies need to keep in mind that policies and procedures they create keep the “human” at the heart of those practices. Before any decision is made, HR and business leaders should ask how this will affect those that must work under the new policies and procedures. And if leaders are unsure of the answers, they should ask the staff – and listen to what they say.

Making employees a priority in all decisions, turns the focus back to the humans at work.

What skills do HR professional need to support the business?

While evaluating the skills that other employees and leaders need in an organisation for everyone to succeed, HR professionals need to consider unique HR skills they need as well. Some of the best HR skills to develop in today’s market will focus on what means to be a strategic HR professional.

Business focused is a strategic skill where the HR leader or professional sees the big picture and what success looks like for the company. From there, the HR profession channels their energy into planning accordingly so the business stays competitive. To do this, they work on these HR skills:

• Organisational acumen – where they understand the fundamentals of the industry they are in and the unique challenges that particular business faces.

• Stakeholder management – where the HR professional can speak with and influence every member involved with business success.

• Storytelling – where they can show as well as tell why a policy or procedure is beneficial and convince others to take action.

Data driven is an analytical skill that helps the HR leaders and professionals make best use of the information to not only see and comprehend what is happening with the business, but to develop policies and procedures that will most likely advance to company to set goals. The best HR skills to do this:

• Analytical thinking – allows the HR professional to see things rightly and make educated deductions from what they see.

• Data analysis – allows the HR professional to interpret the HR data and HR statistics that are collected and make reasonable conclusions from that data.

• Workforce planning – allows them to put into play what they have interpreted from the HR data so that the company hits set goals.

Experience led is a focus on how employees and future employees will experience their lifetime interactions with the organisation. By understanding that it is humans that work for businesses, the HR leaders and professionals can look to develop these HR skills:

• Digital literacy – that means the HR profession is not shy about learning and understanding all the new technology that is available and part of the digital transformation of HR.

• Human centred design – means the HR professional has the skill that when putting together technology bases processes and procedures for their staff, they are able to see how other people would use the software and how to make it easy for them to use.

• EX implementation – means that the HR professional not only understands technology and sees how to adapted it to the employee that work for the company, but they can also launch it in such a way that staff is eager to get started.

Key Takeaway

Businesses with staff that have critical skill will have the advantage over other companies that have yet to focus on achieving a fully productive staff. HR professionals are in an ideal position to assist with this problem of identifying what skills are needed for the organisation and how best to get employees with those skills. For any HR professional not certain how to start or be a valued member with their company, further education of themselves is a first, best step. You can always take a look at our Data Driven HR Fundamentals certification, which provides you with all of the key skills you need to future proof your HR career and become a strategic advisor to the business.

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We help individuals and organisations reinvent learning. Our learning programs support HR Business Partners to build the skills they need to effectively use analytics in HR to have data driven conversations with the business that drive actionable outcomes. The Data Driven HR Fundamentals certification is a collection of 6 on-demand, video based training courses that can be completed within a 12 month period, at your own pace. This certification program is designed to support you and your team build their skills in analytical thinking, data analytics and storytelling. By completing this learning program you will learn how to better interpret HR data and be confident in having data driven conversations with the business, that drive actionable outcomes.