Creating a Competitive Edge with Workforce Development Planning

With 1.2 million unfilled job vacancies across all sectors and seniorities in the UK and more over 50’s than under 25’s available for work, it’s never been more important to get close to the desires and motivations of the workforce that operates your business, in exactly the same way you want to understand the desires and motivations of your customers.

According to new research by Go1 released in a parliamentary committee report, by 2024, there will be a shortfall of 4 million skilled workers as a result of reduced learning and workplace skills gaps.

HR Review reports that 28% of the available UK workforce do not feel properly trained to do their current job, with 78 percent of survey respondents wanting to learn new skills wherever they can.

Insights

Employee feedback that creates actionable data and insights are key to really getting underneath what’s right and what can be improved in your business. Customer surveys and feedback on everything we buy and use are standard. The first businesses that harnessed surveys and star ratings to get close to their customers have since built services and products based on feedback and are getting ahead of their competitors with no guesswork required!

Companies that take the same care and attention with their staff to understand what’s really going on in their business also edge ahead in all people metrics: Recruitment, retention and performance which all affect the bottom line.

Can we honestly say we know and understand the unique and differing perspectives of our colleagues? Are we harnessing the potential that exists in our own organisations? When was the last time your people received any professional development in the form of skills training? If you asked would they say they feel like a valuable asset to your business? 

A successful company that cannot retain staff or has difficulty recruiting will soon be outpaced by a company with employees that don’t want to leave. Happy staff act as brand ambassadors to actively promote your business to their networks, which is a win-win.

And it’s not all about wages………….

Culture

Staff will tell you (via anonymous surveys) if they feel under-skilled or need additional training to do their job better. In a supportive and trust-led culture, they’ll feel comfortable having these conversations openly in their teams and with their line managers and this is exactly the sort of behaviour that should be led and supported from the top. How often do we hear leaders talking about their continual professional development? Behaviour modelling works. Pulse surveys will also help you weed out any undesirable behaviours that may be driving people to leave your business.

Leadership and Communication

Relationship building doesn’t just exist between account managers and customers. Beyond B2B & B2C, there’s B2E: Business to Employee. Today’s line managers and team leaders need to be equipped to help their teams and the individuals in them to excel. Communicating business updates, harnessing the power of collective human effort, in order for their companies to thrive and create marginal gains that multiplied across an organisation lead to substantial gains.

Training and skill building

So great is the power of human potential that it formed the basis of a study producing a formula that accurately predicted the listed companies that would outperform financially on the American stock exchange by +24%. Simply based on the number of hours of training and CPD undertaken in those companies during the previous 1-3 years.

A survey by Middlesex University of 4,300 workers reflected that 74% felt that they weren't achieving their full potential at work due to a lack of development opportunities.

There is no blurred line between employee development and profit. The formula is pretty clear.

Return on Investment

Satisfying yield-hungry shareholders who would move their investments in a heartbeat. At the expense of leaving employees in a learning cul-de-sac and unable to perform better in their role or take on new roles and responsibilities, while bemoaning the lack of skills in the company to grow and seize new business opportunities. A scandalous waste of available resources! This is the equivalent of letting your car run out of fuel/charge and leaving it at the side of the road to go shopping for a new one. Organisations should focus on retention and growing talent from entry roles onwards.

Talent Pipelines

Are you known to your local education providers? Would a Careers lead in a local school or College know you have vacancies to fill? Do you want to develop an Early Careers offering? In the battle for talent, there is some serious competition from large companies who invest hefty sums in early attraction strategies and outreach to Schools and Colleges. Introducing your employer brand to this audience is a no-brainer. Just make sure your employee reviews stack up, our tech-savvy school leavers will do their research on you! A known toxic culture will kill any shiny recruitment ads, even if they are on Tik Tok.

How to Workforce Development Plan

So where to start when so much of business decision-making is taken up with financial and operational matters? Apportioning time and funds to develop staff through training can be seen as an expensive luxury as opposed to a necessity in equipping them to give your business a competitive edge.

A workforce development plan encompasses the entire employee life cycle from pre-employment and attraction through training and retention to the sort of meticulous and careful offboarding that makes employees think twice about going to the competition.

It can help laser in on particular issues to help you and your teams unblock barriers…… plus there’s so much financial help in the form of funded initiatives out there! 

If you’re pressed for time and don’t want to tackle this alone, our expert team will support you through the process.

Need more convincing? Here’s what a client told us about the support they received 

“We knew that we needed to start addressing how we planned our workforce development, beyond traditional recruitment and probation periods. 

Business demands meant it frequently fell down the priority list, despite that nagging feeling and mounting evidence that it needed to be done.

With clear business growth available, and an expanding client portfolio, we just didn’t have the structured people plan sitting alongside the business plan to facilitate that growth.

It was a bit like taking the lid off Pandora’s box but we are so pleased we did “  

Sarah Reed, Airmec Essential Services.

Business West is delivering Workforce for the Future in collaboration with other partners and the West of England Combined Authority.

For more information on Workforce for the Future, please visit the West of England Growth Hub. The Growth Hub is the West of England Combined Authority’s dedicated business support service which offers free, one-to-one advice and guidance for SMEs.

The West of England Workforce for the Future programme has received £4m of funding from the European Social Fund as part of the 2014-2020 European Structural and Investment Funds Growth Programme in England. The Department for Work and Pensions (and in London the intermediate body Greater London Authority) is the Managing Authority for the England European Social Fund programme. Established by the European Union, the European Social Fund helps local areas stimulate their economic development by investing in projects which will support skills development, employment and job creation, social inclusion and local community regenerations. For more information visit: https://www.gov.uk/european-growth-funding.