Skills gaps are a concern for all businesses and organizations as it results in mismatches between what employers (and potentially customers) need and employees’ knowledge and abilities. They can reduce productivity, profits, and customer satisfaction while increasing safety risks, stress, costs, and employee turnover. Keep reading to find out how you can identify the signs of skills gaps and how you can use workforce training, technical writing, and assessments to close it.
Are Skills Gaps Hampering Your Business?
Left unchecked, skills gaps can lower productivity as employees take longer to complete tasks and make more mistakes. In turn, if your team members feel underprepared for the job or overwhelmed, they might be dealing with burnout – leading to high turnover.
Skills gaps can also increase overall costs and lower potential profit. Companies need to invest in additional development, resources, hiring more staff, and outsourcing tasks. If your competitors are keeping up with training and innovations in your industry, you could find your customers – and your best employees – going to them instead.
Plus, if you’re in a regulated industry, insufficient abilities and knowledge can lead to poor compliance, lack of standard operations, failed audits, safety and security risks, accidents, and fines.
Identify Them
If your business is experiencing any of these issues, the root cause might just be a skills gap.
- Repeated mistakes, quality issues, overlooked details, and/or inconsistent results
- Slower than expected work and difficulty meeting goals or deadlines
- High reliance on your best or select employees for problem solutions, training, and/or complex tasks
- Slow to adapt to new technology and resistant to change
- High stress, low confidence, and slow decision making
- An increase in customer complaints
How To Close the Skills Gaps with Workforce Training (and Technical Writing)
Workforce training is your best friend when it’s time to close the skills gaps that are plaguing your organization. To craft a solid plan, follow these four steps.
Check In With Your Employees
Before anything else, you need to review what you need, where you are, and where you need to be in relation to skills and overall business goals.
To start, review your employees’ job descriptions and performance expectations. Next, work with leaders to conduct team member evaluations, performance reviews, and skill assessments to identify where your team currently stands. Then, complete surveys and 1:1 meeting with employees to ask about pain points, stressors, and thoughts on existing training modules and support to determine where the gaps lie.
Create Targeted Workforce Training
With the results of the assessments and surveys in mind, you’ll want to create targeted workforce training modules that fill the skills gaps. Consider how each of your upskilling programs can help your employees get from where they are to where you need them to be.
People learn differently, too. Offer training in various formats, such as workshops, online courses, and hands-on experience, to cover all the bases. Use microlearning where possible to reduce downtime and provide shorter, focused lessons for quick results.
Incorporate Strong Technical Writing Practices
As you draft your training modules and manuals, always follow good technical writing practices, including:
- Write to your audience. Know who will be reading the documentation and write for their knowledge level and needs.
- Use clear, concise language. Focus on readability with clear headers. To avoid confusion, steer clear of jargon or complex terms. If it’s unavoidable, always explain it.
- Create templates. Design company-wide templates to make it easy for your employees to find what they’re looking for no matter the document. Include a table of contents, bullet points, and clearly identified warnings.
- Incorporate visuals. When used correctly, visuals, such as illustrated part breakdowns, graphs, flow charts, and screenshots, can support your writing and improve understanding.
- Use version control. As technology changes, your documents need to keep up. Version control helps you identify the most up-to-date document while also tracking who made changes when.
Keep Going
Training should never be a one-and-done process. Regularly schedule refresher sessions, module reviews, post-training assessments, and feedback collection to determine how well your training is working and where you can improve it. Encourage team members to learn new skills, tools, technologies, and processes with continued access to learning platforms and pathways for career development.
Ignoring any skills gaps simply allows them to widen, and trying to plug the hole with new employees simply increases costs. Instead, focus on upskilling your current team to help them meet the demands and needs of your business. A solid workforce training plan can get them up to speed, reduce stress, and improve overall productivity.
Closing skills gaps takes more than good intentions, it takes the right strategy, the right training, and the right documentation to support it all. That’s where Shea Writing & Training Solutions services comes in. From workforce training programs and skills assessments to clear, compliant, and user-friendly technical documentation, we help organizations build the knowledge their teams need to perform with confidence. If it’s time to strengthen your training, streamline your documentation, and future-proof your workforce, Shea Writing & Training Solutions can help you get there.
