How to Identify and Close Skills Gap in Your Workforce with a LMS

Given the global talent shortage and lack of skilled workers to fill existing roles, the problem of skills deficiency worsens every day, and it is further compounded by continuous advancements in technology. The challenges of identifying and addressing skills gap can be tedious and time-consuming; yet, for any business to maintain its competitive edge, it must be able to identify and fix skill gaps across the organisation quickly.

Proactive organisations now leverage technology, especially an LMS, to help identify and correct skill deficits in their workforce. An LMS is no longer just a platform where you upload and deploy courses, it has become a significant asset that can help you identify and correct skill gaps.

Now, you can empower and motivate your employees to take ownership of their learning when you use an LMS. As a learning professional, use the guide below to identify and address the skills gap in your organisation.

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How to Identify Skills Gap Using Your LMS

Use your LMS to deploy assessments for your learners after each lesson, of course, has been completed. The assessment scores would help you understand how well your learners understand the material that was covered. A clear understanding of the course content would be an indication of how well they would remember and put it into practice.

An employee with low scores would need more training in that area. You should also use your LMS assessments to effectively identify weaknesses in a department or function by simulating the challenges that your employees would regularly face on the job. Their response to these assessments would help you determine the skills they need to acquire.

For example, designing a scenario where a customer offers a low price for your product/service and providing options for your salesperson to either negotiate or agree can help you identify whether your sales team needs training on negotiation skills.

Advanced LMS also incorporates reporting and analytics features. With Learnry’s advanced reporting and analytics features, you can easily generate reports that help you to see trends and pinpoint skills gap with just a few clicks.

Now that you’ve identified the skills gap in your employees, let’s cover the 4-Step process you need to adopt

How to Close Skills Gap Using Your LMS

Identifying skills gap alone is a half win. You need to be able to close these gaps in a scalable and cost-effective way. Use the 4-step process below to fix the skill gaps you’ve identified in teams or individuals.

 

Create Individualised Learning Path

The days of the “one-size fit all” approach is long gone. For more effective learning transfer, you need to help employees pick up from where they are presently and propel them to achieve more using individualised learning paths. It would be best if you create learner-specific goals in line with the gap you are addressing.

So what do you do if you are an organisation that has hundreds of employees? Well, you get an excellent instructional designer or partner with a learning and performance company – such as Digital Learning Africa – to help create a collection of courses for each department based on their collective needs.

From this pool, you then assign a custom learning path to each individual. A learning path consists of courses for your learners to take in a specific order, that would bridge the skills gap you identified. Regardless of their role or career level, every employee needs an accurate and well-defined learning path to help them maximise their potential.

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Reevaluate Effectiveness Using Milestones and Progress Tracking

Keep your employees engaged by creating pauses and stops along their way in the learning path. These brief stops can consist of games, hands-on, discussion forums, live chat and can be used to track and reevaluate the effectiveness of your learning initiative and offer more assistance and guidance where necessary. Learnry’s functionalities enable you to check if the learning path is helping you achieve your objectives at no extra cost.

Leverage Chat Boxes and Discussion Forums for Feedback

To close the skills gap, you need to provide employees with proper and constructive feedback. Use feedback to reassure employees of their progress or redirect them when they are deviating.

An ideal learning management system allows you to chat and host several discussions on your LMS platform. You can also use discussion forums to encourage social learning – where employees learn from themselves and discuss what they’ve learnt in training.

Embed Learning In The Flow Of Work

To properly address skills gap, you need to embed learning in the flow of work. You need to deploy “just-in-time modules” – where an employee takes a lesson then immediately goes out to implement it. Embedding learning helps your learners to be more engaged at work and in the learning process.

As much as possible, you should incorporate challenges that highlight the skill gaps you are trying to address. Their ability to resolve these challenges would help you to evaluate learning transfer and know when the skills deficit is corrected.

On a final note,

a skill gap in your organisation should not be overlooked as it tends to impact all areas of the organisation negatively. However, instead of trying to address skills gaps by hiring new people and trying to evaluate their performance, you should leverage technology to reskill and upskill your employees and close skills gap, reduce turnover, build stronger teams and drive organisational success in a more cost-efficient and effective way.

Proactive organisations use an LMS – such as Learnry – to personalise learning for everyone and create amazingly effective learning paths at half the cost incurred using other traditional means.

With Learnry, you get more than a learning management system; you ultimately get an asset that would merge learning and your desired business outcome to create a more competitive workforce and sustain your business. Get started now, click here to take a free demo.