Talent shortages have become one of the biggest business challenges of the past few years. While this has been a problem for most industries, these shortages are hitting the skilled-trade crafts especially hard. A study by The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte found that “the net need for new employees in manufacturing could be around 3.8 million between 2024 and 2033. And, around half of these open jobs (1.9 million) could remain unfilled…” Additionally, a survey conducted by ATD uncovered that 82% of training leaders report a skills gap in their organization.
Judging by this data, two problems drive this issue: a talent pool gap and a skills gap. Fortunately, as a leader, you can take steps to fill the skills gaps within your organization. Doing this will not only help you make the most of your existing workforce, but it can also offset the talent pool gap by helping you develop and retain high-performing workers. When organizations invest in their people, employees are more likely to stick around—so they won’t need to be replaced.
Addressing your skills gaps involves planning, implementation, measurement, and sustainment. Here are four proven steps to help you address and fill the skills gaps within your workforce.
Step #1: Perform a Skills Gap Analysis
Knowing the present state of your people’s skills is the first step to growing a high-performing workforce. There are two phases to this first step: define which skills are important, then assess your workforce’s current capabilities.
Identify the Skills Needed to Succeed
Define Your Goals
Start by reviewing your organization’s strategic objectives, and based on those, develop goals for your business area. These goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Include short-term goals, like reducing equipment downtime by three percent during the next quarter, as well as longer-term goals, such as reducing yearly external maintenance costs by seven percent over the next three years.
Determine the Skills Necessary to Achieve Those Goals
After you have clarified your goals, identify the skills necessary to help you achieve them. For now, don’t worry about practical training details; just list every skill that will help move your organization toward your defined goals. For instance, if your goal is to reduce equipment downtime, you should include electrical and mechanical troubleshooting on your list of skills, even if you foresee challenges in conducting that type of training.
Map the Skills to Business Performance Metrics
Once you have listed all the skills needing improvement, map each one to a measurable performance outcome that you can review after training is deployed. Ask yourself, for example, which preventive maintenance techniques will contribute to reduced downtime? And how can you benchmark the successful completion of those tasks?
In addition, begin aligning key skills to specific positions. For example, if mechanical troubleshooting falls under the responsibilities of a maintenance technician, that skill should be part of your technician training.
Assess Your Current Workforce Skillset
In the second phase of the skills gap analysis, assess the skillsets of your employees and identify gaps between their current abilities and where you want them to be. To accomplish this, gather data through:
- Performance evaluations | Your employees’ review history can uncover which skills they may lack.
- Training records | Understanding what training the workforce has already completed will reveal the skills that are currently prioritized in training.
- Employee surveys and self-assessments | Managers and employees can provide insights into which skills they need help with.
- Interviews and focus group discussions | Speaking to your employees directly will enable you to ask follow-up questions and uncover development opportunities.
- Skill testing | When employees demonstrate tasks or procedures in the field, you’ll get a strong sense of their real-world abilities.
Use various methods to gain a holistic view of your workforce’s capabilities. Once you have assessed this data, use it to create a skills inventory, a record of all the available skills that currently exist within your organization. Comparing this inventory to the list (and levels) of skills necessary to reach your goals will help you identify the gaps where you should invest in new training.
Step #2 Implement New Training That Addresses Skills Gaps
Now that you have a definitive list of the skills you need to build, it’s time to design a learning program to fill these gaps. Start by cataloging your existing craft skills training. Take note of which skills can be addressed using your current training content and which ones will require new resources.
Next, define the methods and activities that address specific skills gaps. This may require some ingenuity, especially if your training resources are limited. When gathering training content, consider the 5B process (borrow, buy, build, bend, burn) to help you determine when to adapt an existing tool, when to pay for a third-party solution, and when to build a custom solution internally.
When creating industrial skills training, structure your program in a way that helps learners build skills effectively over time. Begin with activities that build capability (understanding how to perform a task) and then progress to competency (understanding why a task must be performed and being able to perform it efficiently). This will help build confidence and commitment in your learners, enabling them to master skills in a way that directly contributes to the business. As you develop your training program, there are several best practices to keep in mind.
Create Personalized Learning Pathways
Since your employees are individuals with their own roles, skills, experiences, and learning preferences, they each have unique requirements. A personalized learning path can be tailored—either manually or with the help of learning technologies—to these specific needs. This method empowers workers to take ownership of their training by enabling each learner and their manager to set an optimal roadmap for peak performance. Some common methods of personalizing content include branching pathways that allow learners to choose which order they engage with lessons. Branching pathways also often include test-outs where learners can take an assessment and skip training for skills they have already mastered.
Integrate Practical Scenarios and Hands-On Learning
Training based on real-world applications is ideal for improving technical skills. A learning scenario is a storyline that asks the learner to apply abstract knowledge to a realistic, simulated situation. In this modality, workers are free to practice key concepts and make decisions in a safe environment that allows them to fail without fear of repercussions.
Hands-on learning takes learners beyond capability to competency by prompting them to perform important tasks in real environments. While there’s no substitute for tactile application in an industrial setting, it can be tough to train this way when errors made on technical equipment can pose a safety risk. Industrial training aids provide a good alternative here. These practice workstations should be built with industry-standard equipment and hardware to replicate key industrial equipment found in the field. This allows employees to practice with the tools they’ll actually be using but without danger or productivity implications. This way, learners can navigate complex tasks and perform key procedures, bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and real-world application.
Leverage AI Tools to Optimize the Design Process
In the learning and development (L&D) landscape, you can use various AI-augmented solutions to help optimize your training content more quickly and on a larger scale. For example, with skilled human guidance, generative AI can quickly generate course outlines, assignments, quizzes, and storyboards for instructional videos. It can also make your content more accessible through features such as language translations and transcripts. Finally, adaptive learning algorithms can help create the personalized learning paths mentioned earlier, anticipating their upcoming needs and suggesting the right training.
Create Change-Agile Leaders
As you begin to upskill your workforce, be sure to train your managers and frontline employees. Improvement requires change, and providing your leaders with change management training will give them the skills and tools to guide their teams through periods of transition. You should also work with your managers to create a knowledge transfer plan that captures expertise from veteran employees and uses this knowledge to develop the next generation of technical talent.
Step #3 Assess the Effectiveness of Your Skills Gap Training
As you develop your training plan, build in a measurement plan that gauges the effectiveness of your learning methods. Remember when we tied skills to specific business outcomes at the beginning of the process? Here is where those efforts pay off. Monitor short- and long-term goals to gauge how well the organization is progressing toward these ambitions.
Success in corporate training can be defined in a variety of different ways, from learning outcomes to business metrics. For this reason, you should gather data from a variety of additional sources to help provide a complete view of your program’s effectiveness.
Test Your Learners’ Skills
Your program’s ultimate goals are oriented around business ROI, but your training’s first objective is to build and develop skills. Design and follow through on your plan to measure the effectiveness of your program in this area.
Evaluate Progress on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Establish a set of KPIs tied to each skill you are trying to develop, and capture benchmarks before training begins. For example, if you mean to improve troubleshooting skills, your KPIs might include:
- The average time it takes technicians to resolve technical issues.
- The percentage of issues resolved on the technician’s first attempt.
- The number of errors or mistakes made during troubleshooting.
- The number of follow-up support requests necessary after the initial troubleshooting.
After training is completed, measure these KPIs again to gauge the improvement in your workers’ performance.
Perform On-the-Job Observations
Monitor job performance to assess how well participants are applying new skills to their daily work and determine whether they have simply gained capability or achieved true competency. This can be integrated into your existing performance review process or done through direct employee observation.
Test Your Learners’ Knowledge
To understand your training program’s successes and opportunities for improvement, you must measure whether your learners understand the concepts you’ve taught them. If they don’t truly grasp the concepts, they won’t be able to apply that knowledge and contribute to the organization’s business goals.
Be sure to incorporate knowledge checks and assessments at the conclusion of your courses. Review the data and look for patterns in how learners performed. This will reveal areas where your lessons are successful and uncover sections where learners struggle. Later, follow-up assessments will be used to determine whether learners are retaining critical knowledge over time.
Test Your Learners’ Reactions
It’s also important to understand how your learners experience your learning program. Even if they understand what you are teaching them, some variables can potentially make or break their learning experience.
Collect Feedback Using Surveys, Interviews, and Focus Groups
Surveys are an efficient way to gather information from a large group of learners. When creating questionnaires, strive to include a broad range of questions that cover every aspect of the learning experience. Write your surveys to capture both quantitative and qualitative responses. Here are some questions to get you started:
- Was the training engaging?
- Were there areas where you struggled to understand the lessons?
- Did the lessons fit into your normal flow of work?
- Were there any technical issues that disrupted the employee experience?
For more specific input, try scheduling one-on-one interviews or arranging focus groups. This will give you more direct feedback on what works and where your training can be improved.
Step #4 Sustain Your Learning by Continually Assessing, Adjusting, and Improving
Remember that skills gap training is an ongoing process. The industry and your workforce are constantly evolving, so expect new skills gaps to emerge over time. Once your program is in place, build the formal infrastructure necessary to sustain it. This system should include regular assessments followed by periodic adjustments to ensure that your learning remains relevant, effective, and aligned with key business outcomes.
You can also create a culture of continuous learning to help retain your current top performers by celebrating successes and rewarding individual achievements. Recognition doesn’t have to cost you anything, but it improves employee satisfaction, reduces turnover, and makes your organization more stable in the long term.
There’s No Better Time to Start
By following these four steps—conducting a skills gap analysis, implementing targeted training, evaluating its effectiveness, and fostering continuous improvement—you can effectively bridge the technical skills gap in your organization. This proactive approach not only reinforces your workforce’s capabilities but also supports employee retention and operational efficiency. Investing in workforce development now will ensure your organization remains competitive in the face of future challenges.
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