Skills and Diversity – the other big topics of 2020
Most conversations in 2020 have been focussed on COVID-19, and rightly so, considering we are living through a once in a hundred year pandemic. But if we are going to recover successfully, post the health crisis, then we need to focus on rebuilding our economy and getting people back to work.
The challenge is that there has been a seismic shift in the labour market. Jobs in many industries simply won’t return, while other industries will be hamstrung by a lack of skills. Regardless, everyone is realising that the core skills underpinning the economy have altered significantly, with new skills required and many workers needing retraining.
However, the methods we use to measure current and required skills, against which to target this massive reskilling imperative, are antiquated an incapable of addressing this skills crisis effectively and efficiently, so things need to change, but how?
Skills
The sad reality is, however, that the skills gap in Australia, and around the world, is nothing new, and it has been widening steadily for years.
In recognition of this, in July 2019, the Australian Federal Government established the National Skills Commission to address the already expected impact on millions of jobs across the Australian workforce as a result of technological change, shifts in the global economy, and industrial transitions towards sustainability, as forecast in numerous studies including the 2017 productivity report “Shifting the Dial”.
As urgent as this seemed at the time, little did they know that lurking in the background was a particularly nasty virus that would compound their already gloomy predictions and shorten the timeframe to impact by years, as summarised in this excerpt from Senator Michaelia Cash’s ministerial forward to the National Skills Commission July 2020 report The Australian labour market and COVID-19;
“Australia’s capacity to grow, compete and thrive in a global economy has become dependent on employers and individuals being able to access and use the right skills at the right time. As we deal with COVID-19 and the impact on the economy, now more than ever, we need to understand what is happening in the labour market, the structural shifts that will occur and the skilling and re-training needed to get people into jobs.”
However, while reading this report I had a huge sense of déjà vu, so I started searching and soon came across this statement;
“The principal objects of this Act are to increase, and improve the quality of the employment related skills of the Australian workforce so that it works more productively, flexibly and safely, thereby increasing the efficiency and international competitiveness of Australian industry.”
Sounds current right? No so much. In fact this is an excerpt from the Training Guarantee (Administration) Act of 1990. That’s right, 30 years ago.
So, if Australia, like many other nations, have been grappling with this issue for so long, as evidenced by the World Economic Forum also trying to solve for it with their The Reskilling Revolution: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Education for a Billion People by 2030 initiative, clearly there is a systemic issue at play. Read on to hear how we can work together to fix this.
Diversity
At the same time, the lack of diversity and equality in many industries and workplaces can no longer be simply dismissed as “unintended” or a “work in progress”. The recent annual ASX200 Senior Executive Census by advocacy group Chief Executive Women revealed that only 10 women currently fill CEO roles at Australia’s ASX200 firms. Worse still, of the 50 CEO appointments made by these firms over the last 2 years, only 3 have been women.
With equivalent education, skills, and experience, there is only one reason why there remains so few women in these, and many other, leadership positions and that is BIAS, plain and simple. Conscious or unconscious, it doesn’t matter, and it needs to be eradicated now. Again, solutions exist to fix this so please read on.
Training and Reskilling / Upskilling
As important as training is to the national reskilling imperative, history has proven that simply throwing training at the problem does not, and cannot, deliver the seismic shifts now required. In fact, looking to training when you’re in the middle of a skills crisis is like reflecting on your unhealthy lifestyle when you’re having a heart attack. It’s all a little too late.
That’s why I’m concerned about many current, well-meaning initiatives, that appear to be repeating history by pursuing predominantly training focussed solutions to our current skills crisis, be they macro-education policies or incremental micro-credentialing initiatives.
And clearly, throwing more training at our under-represented corporate leadership aspirants isn’t going to remove the current roadblocks to their career progression.
Measuring Skills
This is where all these issues converge, but to solve for them, we first need to take one step back and rethink how we value and measure skills in the first place. I see little evidence that any of us think about our skills on a regular basis, like we have learned to think about our health choices, and nor do we record them in objective and measurable terms. This is best evidenced by most of us using our wordy, free form CVs as the primary repository of our skills portfolio, and only updating that when we are looking to change jobs every few years or more. That is entirely the wrong mindset.
Compounding this is that the skills and experience described in our position descriptions, either current or aspirational, are equally unstructured and un-measurable, making it impossible to objectively assess the skills gap between our current skills and those required of the role. This subjectivity impacts all aspects of the employee lifecycle. “It’s hard to plan where you’re going if you don’t know where starting from.”
So clearly, if we are going to address these skills and diversity gaps, at all levels within the enterprise and across the national economy, we must start by describing the current and desired state of all skills in measurable terms.
Competency Frameworks
Whilst only the first part of the total Skills and Diversity transformation solution, Competency Frameworks bring the critical standardised, objective, measurable, and transparent criteria to skills that address all the downstream corrections that our workplaces require if we are going to genuinely address these critical issues of fairness.
Competency Frameworks describe knowledge, skills, experience, leadership, and behaviours in general, often industry specific, terms, and then describe levels of proficiency an individual typically gains on their path to achieving excellence in the competency.
By applying these international standards to all HR processes, including all position descriptions from the CEO down, along with the self-assessments supporting recruitment, performance reviews, learning and development prioritisation, and career planning, immediately everyone begins being measured on an equal, fair, and transparent basis regardless of if you are male or female, black or white, old or young, straight or gay, and so on.
Additionally, by rolling this data up through teams, enterprises, and the national and international collective, we are able to objectively and perpetually measure skills and capability at all levels.
Only then can we accurately target the training required to close the identified skills gaps and measure the resulting short and long term benefits.
As we start recovering from the global pandemic, addressing the skills gap and improving our diversity record will be imperative for Australia's workplace fairness and competitiveness. I urge you to join this conversation by sharing how your organisation is addressing these issues.
Regards Graeme
