A pivotal point: the future of workforce development

Workforce development is key to the collective economic future and to the UK’s global economic competitiveness and leadership. Before the pandemic, chief executives viewed the unavailability of talent and skills as one of their biggest business threats. Now, although the recession is increasing the availability of candidates to hire, automation is rapidly changing the nature of work, the importance of new digital skills is ever increasing and the skills shortage is widening.

It is cheaper to ‘build than buy’, to extend existing employee skills than recruit. Yet, when it comes to that critical reskilling and upskilling, many businesses are lagging behind. While at least $240bn is spent globally every year on corporate training, only a small proportion currently goes towards technology and genuine upskilling and reskilling – and much of that is on the limited solution of e-learning content, often with a focus on generic compliance training, rather than understanding how to identify and tackle skills gaps.

While tailored content is still needed, it plays a diminishing part in a fast-moving, boundaryless and service-based global workplace. Workforce development must move on from working in a silo to being deeply embedded across the business and, crucially, from a focus on content delivery and learning to a focus on performance.