FUTURE-PROOFING
YOUR WORKFORCE
Businesses need to future-proof their workforce and embrace new
approaches when it comes to skills development. By Neil Tyler
“You can’t hire your way
out of a skills shortage.
Your team can’t Google
their way to pro ciency.
If you held in-person training before
every project, you’d never deliver
anything,” said Aaron Skonnard, the
co-founder and CEO of Pluralsight, an
enterprise technology skills platform
that provides online learning tools to
help individuals and companies better
understand what skills they lack and
how to acquire new ones.
It’s well documented that there
is a massive global technology
skills shortage across a variety of
industries, so having access to
skilled workers is a critical factor that
sets successful companies apart
from failing ones.
The skills gap is likely to get worse
with advances in arti cial intelligence
(AI), robotics and other emerging
technologies, while the very nature of
jobs is also changing.
Successful companies are so
because they re-skill their workforce
and, according to the World
Economic Forum, this enables them
to, “harness new and emerging
technologies to reach higher levels of
ef ciency of production and expand
into new markets.”
With advances in technology
there is strong demand for technical
skills like programming and app
development, but also for creative
thinking, problem-solving and
negotiating skills.
As new roles emerge, skills
requirements will change and the size
of the existing pool of skilled workers
isn’t going to be big enough to meet
demand.
Assessing the skills gap
“It’s critical that you understand
your strengths and weaknesses
at both a personal and company
level. How large is your skills gap
and how are you going to close it?
Those are fundamental questions,”
explains Sean Farrington, SVP EMEA,
Pluralsight.
Traditionally gaps have been
addressed by hiring the necessary
talent but for many companies this
is a short-term solution and as
technology advances new skills will
be required in what is a never ending
cycle.
While companies can look to
develop their own courseware for
reskilling and up-skilling employees,
Pluralsight is one of a number of
online learning platforms that helps
businesses stay ahead of digital
disruption, offering a mixture of online
courses in areas including software
development, data science, machine
learning and AI.
“Pluralsight provides the content,
tools and analytics to enable
companies and employees to remain
current and upgrade their skills in
new areas. The methods traditionally
used to build technology skills are
no longer sustainable as they are
failing to keep up with the speed of
22 22 September 2020 www.newelectronics.co.uk
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