How to close skill gaps faster

For a lot of companies, growing talent means trying to fill skill gaps with upskilling programs, but many new skills (like GenAI) are entering the market and development programs can’t keep up. So, the gap widens even as learning chiefs invest in new programs and employees sign up for them.

As HR, executive and function-area leaders try to address the limitations of development programs, they’re still under pressure from CEOs and employees to provide more skill building opportunities that can help individuals and organizations succeed. Business leadership might attempt to predict the kinds of skills that the future demands. But these predictions can be imprecise, and it’s common that what employees learn in upskilling programs and what turns out to be needed don’t line up.  

Businesses should not endure this cycle of mismatched skills and needs. The solution lies in taking a hard look at the issues with traditional skill-gap analysis and recruitment and adopting a more dynamic and holistic approach. Using data to pinpoint underlying organizational needs can better inform the kind of upskilling that can fill the gaps. 

Those patterns, in turn, gave rise to a lightbulb moment—the realization that many functions beyond HR, and across different businesses, could adapt and scale these approaches—and to broader dialogue with the CEO and CFO.

Where the traditional skill-gap analysis and recruitment fall short

Traditional methods of understanding skill gaps and emerging competencies tend to be manual, fragmented or piecemeal. HR systems that gather and analyze employee performance and feedback are often separate from the data a company might gather about future skills. It’s also hard to make predictions about future roles that require skill sets an organization might not have in-house or even need yet.  

The pace of technological change and advancement doesn’t help the traditional skill gaps analysis process. Industry trends for roles, and the skills needed to fill them, constantly fluctuate. By the time hiring managers get a handle on a trend they’re piecing together, it may have shifted.

What’s more, hiring managers may not have any labor or workforce data to work from to project the skills they’ll need. Or they might rely on buzzwords without knowing how those “buzzworthy” skills apply to their business. For example, a recruiter might search for “AI” without understanding what specific skills are needed to drive success in their company’s existing or emerging roles. 

A skills mismatch can also happen when recruiters write requirements for roles that don't align with what a business needs. For example, a recruiting template might require a hiring manager to enter a certain number of years of experience—but what if it’s the ability to use a brand-new coding language? No one is going to have a lot of experience in that area yet. 

While executive or HR leadership may have insight into some aspects of workforce skills and gaps, most aren’t using a holistic live view that instills the confidence to develop forward-looking workforce strategies for sourcing, training, growth and succession planning.

A dynamic approach to closing the skills gap

Today’s workforce demands coupled with the rapid pace of change means the time between skills development and application is shrinking. At PwC, we responded to this problem with a dynamic approach to incorporate learning that cultivated our people’s digital skills. 

Within the first year of our upskilling program, we saw top line growth and enhanced employee experience. Nearly three years into our journey, 75% of our people say the technology they now know how to use helps them work more effectively. Plus, more than 80% of teams reported they developed digital skills and now seek out new ways to use these skills and technologies. 

The smarter way to attack workforce planning and upskilling problems is to move the needle on skill development, retention and immediate applicability to enterprise-wide efficiency and growth. Companies should have a practical solution that integrates information from the external, industry-specific and market forces at play with their own internal company data.  

We’ve used our own upskilling experiences to build a platform to help other organizations identify the skills they need and design and deploy learning that gets results. 

ProEdge: An upskilling platform for your organization

ProEdge can give you a data-driven approach to upskilling. This cloud-based platform helps streamline skill gap analysis, recruiting and corporate learning by delivering a more realistic snapshot of your workforce skills profile. ProEdge is an end-to-end upskilling platform that can identify the skills your organization needs to compete now and, in the future, and helps you bring digital transformation to life.  

Our technology-driven insights draw from millions of marketplace data points to help uncover what you need to succeed in the future. Then, the platform can deliver relevant content to your employees based on the skill gaps and needs identified in that first step. Your employees can also enjoy access to a cloud-based sandbox of solutions where they can practice digital skills and complete scenario-based projects to earn credentials.

ProEdge is an intuitive, AI-powered upskilling platform. The platform can prepare your people to embrace the opportunities and manage the risks of generative AI, featuring: 

• Six curated generative AI pathways available out-of-the-box  

• Industry-leading courses from top providers including PwC  

• Digital badges to reward and showcase success  

• Over 30k learning resources available across the platform 

• Adaptive recommendations based on user engagement  

• Weekly releases of new content  

• Quarterly learning track updates 

• Available via mobile and desktop 

Plan: A deeper dive into the first step 

The foundational component of ProEdge is Plan. Plan offers a systematic, data-driven approach to understanding your current workforce profile—highlighting areas of strengths and development opportunities in objective, straightforward ways you can view as easily as you would on a smartphone app. Using this data, leadership teams and human capital administrators can develop innovative, forward-looking plans while taking into account the needs of individuals, teams, functions and the status of the enterprise. 

Plan’s strong foundation includes more than 200 million data points from more than 25+ sources as well as insights from PwC subject matter specialists. The job market data we aggregate and synthesize also includes over 10,000 occupations, 100M resumes, 10M job listings and 500,000 skills.

ProEdge’s skills analysis capability was engineered from the ground up and constantly evolves to reflect changes in your industry and function. 

Plan can solve the problems of identifying skill gaps by gathering information from internal and external sources so HR and executive leaders can access current data in real-time about the market and their organization. Imagine the power of making talent decisions based on objective data rather than subjective opinions, anecdotal evidence or outdated information.

How does Plan determine where your gaps lie? 

Plan gathers the company labor data and combines it with workforce profiles and online professional network data. Then, it runs this accumulated information through models to identify potential gaps relative to industry trends. Your leadership teams and staff can run scenario analyses, develop workforce plans and monitor progress through a simple, intuitive, dashboard-like experience. 

Plan’s underlying data-driven approach can empower you to make strategic and operational decisions with confidence.

So, what do you do with your existing systems? Using our architecture, data from your human resource, learning management and enterprise resource planning systems can be integrated into ProEdge without IT heavy lifting.  

Plan provides the ability to answer big questions

• What is our current workforce profile? 

• Where are the biggest gaps in skills, and how do we measure up to our industry peers? 

• Are there trending and emerging skills we should consider investing in? 

• How do we build and assign learning pathways that close our workforce skill gaps?

ProEdge uses industry-leading machine learning algorithms to enable a personalized, relevant experience for leaders, administrators and learners. The platform can deliver precise skills mapping that enables innovative, individualized learning pathways. These pathways then empower employees to learn the skills that can elevate the digital acumen of an overall organization. 

ProEdge can give people the ability to improve their ways of working and build solutions that help drive efficiency. This is the answer to the problem of mismatched skills and roles and trying to make learning stick. 

Invest in Tomorrow 

Accelerate your employees’ learning and help drive scalable impact for your business with ProEdge, a PwC product —an intuitive, AI-powered learning platform that leverages hands-on experience and aggregated content to prepare your learners for real business challenges.