Imagine, after 6 years, you are a post-grad, but still unemployed. You wonder why no one hires you even after having a college degree. Nothing could be more dissatisfactory than be young and unemployed. If there are so many start-ups opening every day, why most of our young fresh college grads are unemployed? Well, one of the biggest blockades to employment for young people is lack of experience. Nobody wants to hire an inexperienced college grad. Companies don’t want to take on the time and expense of training young workers, or maybe young professionals simply don’t know how to present the skills necessary to get them hired.
A study by Accenture revealed that nearly half of U.S. executives feel they won't be able to find employees with the skills they need in the coming years. To combat that, 51 percent plan to increase their investment in training over the next two years.
How do we bridge this employment skills gap?
Some of the ways in which business leaders can find a competent, and skilled talent pool are as follows:
- Start the recruitment process way earlier: Leading companies should partner with institutions/universities and if necessary they should review and revise set of courses or the relevant skills which are acquired for their companies. Some of the American Companies with a niche industry have already started this practice. They are even setting up open access training programs in the University and when trained, the first right of employment is with the company that trained them.
- Enhance and enrich your internship program: You must have noticed that most of the companies don’t take internship program very seriously and that gives little benefit to both students and employers. If we make a regular internship program and training program in organization where they handle or assist actual projects as they’re supervised and be given feedback, as if they have hired an employee and giving those operations training. While in internship, firms should not be ambiguous in the skills you need as you train interns. Give them little freedom, little innovation to take up a particular job in her/his way. Sometimes, interns don’t look beyond their own employment history, but they may have skills in other areas which could be useful to a company.
- Be Creative in your training programs: Believe me, induction programs could be absolutely boring and employees can take them as a burden. Rather than classroom training, some of the other recent scalable developments are helping training become more relevant, such as social media tools or a mobile app on your company and its SOPs that can facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing, and allows learning to take place wherever an employee happens to be. These tools could be really useful for the field force personnel.
- Broad your horizon for ‘the Perfect Employee’: I think it’s the high time when companies should consider dropping the notion of finding the "perfect" employee based on a list of degrees, and number of years of experience. Instead, companies should have a generalist profile while looking for people, with generalist skills, no matter if is outside their industry, in other geographies, or with adjacent or overlapping skill sets — that can easily be developed to perform the job.
