How to align employee skills with business goals

64% of L&D professionals said that re-skilling the current workforce to fill skills gaps is their top priority, but aligning employee skills with business goals is a 4-step process

Understand your business goals
Analyse current skills for strengths and gaps
Provide access to content, experts and communities
Personalise learning for each individual

Understand your business goals

Until you understand what we you are trying to achieve as a business, you will have a poor understanding of the skills we need.

Set an overall target for your business e.g. to make £30 Million revenue this year. Then have discussions with your department heads to best understand how to translate this down to their teams.

Set OKRs or KPIs across your business to align each individual towards your overall business goals.

Analyse your skills for strengths and gaps

Now that you understand where you're going, you need to know who can see ahead, who can steer the boat and who can fix the engine.

Use reports to understand skills across your business. It is important not just to look at the volume of skills but the depth and quality of each skill. Where do you have a wealth of experts? Where do you need to provide training?

Provide access to content, experts and communities

77% of workers are ready to learn new skills or completely retrain. Often the willingness is there, but employees don't know where to turn to get that training.

As a business you need to be giving your employees access to the very best articles, books, courses and events tailored to them. It is also important to facilitate connections between employees and others in the company, such as experts for training and coaching, as well as with their internal community for idea sharing and collaboration.

Once you provide access to these resources, you can build a learning culture where people regularly help each other to upskill.

Personalise learning for each individual

By working closely with your employees you can understand where they want to be in their personal and professional lives.

This allows you to support them with personalised career development plans which help them to reach their goals and help the business to succeed.

Aligning employee skills with business goals is essential for the success of any company. By taking steps to identify skills gaps, create a learning culture, and provide employees with opportunities to develop their skills, companies can ensure that they have the right people with the right skills to achieve their goals.