Global skills shortage and how to solve the problem of a tight market?

Global skills shortage and how to solve the problem of a tight market?

Guest writer Sonya Law tackles a topic that is plaguing every industry write now: the global skills shortage, and how to solve the problem of a tight market. 

“Be an organisation who truly understands what candidates want and values will put you ahead of the pack.  Before you try to fix the talent shortage problem, be clear about your EVP (Employee Value Proposition)and how the conversation will go with prospective candidates.  Work strategically and in partnership with your Talent Acquisition (TA) teams and vendors to solve this problem together.  Organisations who do this well, will secure top talent now and in the future”

The problems we are facing globally are not new in staffing organisations what is new is what candidates prioritise as important.  Candidates know their value in the market and are now going after what they want, we need to be both tactical and strategic on how we do this.

This shift is largely because of the pandemic and is also stress driven, those experiencing burnout are opting for roles where they can work remotely and less hours.  Other considerations are there needs to be investment into management training on how we engage our remote workforce.  

  1. Competitive Salary – Candidates know their worth in the market. Employees who are not being valued and remunerated to that level are also weighing up their options of whether to stay or go.  These conversations need to be taken seriously and acted on and be part of the system of work.
  2. EVP – Benefits are important to candidates in their evaluation of prospective employers.  What is important to the effectiveness of these programs is that they are communicated to candidates. Use of social media and particularly videos and organizational story telling are powerful tools in communicating the benefits of working with an organization.
  3. Flexibility – Post Pandemic candidates expect flexible, hybrid work options and opportunity to negotiate where, when and how work gets done. It is different for everyone and is not a one size fits all approach.
  4. Psychologically safe workplaces – Candidates want to work for organization’s who support mental health and wellbeing is important, who create space and awareness for those conversations is important. Fostering ability to have mental health conversations. Progressive organizations are investing in MHFA (Mental Health First Aid) training and removing the stigma by educating and supporting leaders on how to have supportive mental health conversations.
  5. Purpose, Vision, Values lead organization – Important to candidates is alignment between personal and organizational ‘purpose’ driven statements.  When recruiters can have a conversation with candidates about ‘purpose’ attraction and retention of that candidate throughout the life cycle of the hire improves exponentially.  It also serves to mitigate risks of offers from other prospective employers, when you have built that trust with the candidate.  It is very time consuming and exhausting for a candidate to engage with multiple job offers, if you have built a good relationship, they will happily deal with you to the exclusion of others when this is achieved.
  6. Diversity is not just a token – Lean in, listen and learn.  Organisations who do this well will differentiate themselves from other job opportunities.  Be ready and prepared to have conversations about social impact and CSR (corporate social responsibility) in the interview process, give examples of where this is happening in your organization.
  7. Innovation – Organizations who are focused on Innovation and who have adopted innovative approach like design thinking will be ahead of the game. 
  8. Giving and receiving feedback – radical candor does not work its brutal, we still are not doing this well.  Feedback needs to be timely, specific, constructive and respectful and is more likely to be taken onboard from someone we trust.  Candidates appreciate feedback and not being ghosted by HR and recruiters; we need to improve in this area.  This sets a tone for how feedback is handled within your organization. There is a direct link between proactive and constructive feedback, for increased opportunities for learning, internal promotions and remuneration conversations.  Feedback is important.
  9. Fear of failure – Optimistic organizations thrive when it comes to innovation, recognise that failure is part of learning.  It’s an iterative process, what’s important is implementing a learning culture and growth mindset approach. We need to create an environment where employees can practice new skills without the fear of failure.
  10. Developing leaders – to build their emotional intelligence and to see themselves as a coach and to set them up for success to manage a remote workforce.  Also, the democratization of learning where learning is valued and encouraged at every level.  A culture that promotes that everyone is a leader in their ability to influence at every level.  To foster collaboration and involve the team in what they focus on, and their goals will lead to better outcomes. Employees are more likely to take ownership of a goal when they’re involved and take responsibility for their success. 

How well we do in these areas will define the success in attracting and retaining talent in a tight market now and in the future.  

‘Take care of your people and they will take care of business’ Sonya Law.

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Friday Filosophy v.07.08.2022

Friday Filosophy v.07.08.2022

Jacques-Yves Cousteau known as Jacques Cousteau (11 June 1910 – 25 June 1997) was a French naval officer, explorer, ecologist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water. He helped create the Aqua-Lung, helped marine conservation and was a member of the Académie française. He was also known He was also known as “le Commandant Cousteau” or “Captain Cousteau”.

He had one brother, Pierre-Antoine. Cousteau attended Collège Stanislas in Paris. In 1930, he entered the École Navale and graduated as a gunnery officer. After an automobile accident cut short his career in naval aviation, Cousteau changed to studying the sea.

In Toulon, where he was serving on the Condorcet, Cousteau carried out his first underwater experiments, thanks to his friend Philippe Tailliez who in 1936 lent him some Fernez underwater goggles. Cousteau also belonged to the information service of the French Navy, and was sent on missions to Shanghai and Japan (1935–1938) and in the USSR (1939).[source?]

On 12 July 1937 he married Simone Melchior (1919-1990), with whom he had two sons, Jean-Michel (born 1938) and Philippe (1940–1979). His sons took part in the adventures of the Calypso. In 1991, after his wife Simone’s death from cancer, he married Francine Triplet. They already had a daughter Diane Cousteau (born 1980) and a son Pierre-Yves Cousteau (born 1982), born during Cousteau’s marriage to his first wife.

On the morning of 25 June 1997, Jacques-Yves Cousteau died at his home in Paris, aged 87 from a heart attack. Despite rumors, encouraged by some Islamic publications and websites, Cousteau did not convert to Islam, and when he died he was buried in a Roman Catholic Christian funeral. He was buried in the family vault at Saint-André-de-Cubzac in France. A street was named “rue du Commandant Cousteau” in a street which runs near his native house, where a commemorative plaque was affixed.

  • The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.
  • Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.
  • From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.
  • When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.
  • No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be, can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal.
  • What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on.
  • If we were logical, the future would be bleak, indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work.
  • The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers. Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years.
  • However fragmented the world, however intense the national rivalries, it is an inexorable fact that we become more interdependent every day.
  • I believe that national sovereignties will shrink in the face of universal interdependence.
  • If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.
  • It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert.
  • Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.
  • We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about – farming replacing hunting.
  • I am not a scientist. I am, rather, an impresario of scientists.
  • A lot of people attack the sea, I make love to it.

The Time is Now

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The Sage on the Stage

The Sage on the Stage

This week our founder and managing member, Ron Slee, asks us to take a moment to remember and wonder about the sage on the stage. Where are they now?

I started teaching children at a country club when I was a teenager. I taught people how to swim. I did that every summer from the time I was 14 until I had to get a real job in business. During my teaching of athletics, I ended up teaching at McGill University in Montreal. I was teaching students who were getting a degree in athletics. I was asked to develop a coaching and training program as well as water safety. I had classes three night a week. Half was in a classroom and half was in the pool. I loved it. I guess I am a teacher at heart as I truly love to see the lights go on in people’s eyes when they “get it.”

The classroom was long and relatively thin. It had a raised dais in the front of the room with a wall-to-wall black board. A stage. I was never comfortable with that situation so I started what a has become a habit of wandering around through the desks and among the students. Then recently I ran across the title of the blog “A sage on the stage.”

It was an interesting paper that was addressing the exclusive nature of education at University. The paper talked about the thirty-one million people in the US between the ages of 18 and 24. Thirteen million of them are current undergraduates; almost three quarters of them are enrolled in four-year-degree programs. The article also pointed out that 0.2% of the 18-to-24-year-old population was enrolled in Ivy league schools. 63,000 students.

Society at large as well as educators and legislators have been struggling with this problem for some time. Inertia is hard to overcome. Everyone in America is aware of the student debt problem. There are many issues to be faced in solving this problem. One of them is that trade schools fight with liberal arts schools for funding. This should not be a zero-sum game.

Looking at the structure today shows most classes have between three and four credit hours. A semester “load” is 12 to 18 credit hours and lasts for 15 weeks. Each year is two semesters and four years is what is required to earn a degree. That structure has been around for a long, long time. Many don’t think that is works in today’s world. Further information comes from a study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. They tested 2,300 students and found that after first and second years 45% and found that once after four years they demonstrated no improvements in key areas including writing and critical thinking.

They believe, as we do at Learning Without Scars (LWS), that Lifelong Learning needs to help people move in and out of the classroom. In fact, we should be creating and experimenting with dozens of new models to keep the workforce and the new entrants to the workforce in a position that they have skills that apply to the ever-changing workplace.

One of the thoughts on changing learning is to have three staggered 12-to-18 months of learning and work interspersed. This is similar to how many technical school programs work today. Western University in Canada has had this type of program for decades. It works.

One of the missing pieces, in my opinion is that we do not have enough advising and mentoring in education and career selections. We also need to have much more intensive internships and career development available to students and parents. As we have found at LWS learners benefit from more frequent, low-stakes real time individual assessments and quizzes interspersed in learning programs. This type of constant assessment and quiz changes how a student learns and enables more serious concentration on the material being presented by teachers. There is an awareness that the usual checking-in and checking-out listening and learning that has become the norm with a fifty minute or longer class doesn’t work and the students learn with very quickly with constant quizzes and assessment through learning experience.

This also leads to more awareness at the student and business level of the need for constant learning and relearning of skills and knowledge. Those of you who follow our blogs know that Ed Gordon has made a pronouncement that 50% of the current American work force will not have the skills required to hold and keep a job by 2030. That, if it becomes true, which is quite likely will mean very radical changes in the American society. How can the American education system, business community, and state and federal taxation handle such a situation?

Many people have written on this subject most recently is Senator Ben Sasse from Nebraska who was once a University President. This is a very serious situation and one that needs much more debate and thought. 

 The Time is Now.

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Just Say Yes!

Just Say Yes!

Founder and managing member Ron Slee modifies the Nike slogan in this week’s blog, as he asks readers to “Just Say Yes!”

Nike started it didn’t they? Just Do It. How could you forget it as it was and continues to be everywhere? I was reminded of that yesterday during a Zoom meeting with Steve Clegg of Winsby. We were having a discussion about finance and forecasting when the discussion turned to questions that are asked of dealers. Steve opined that there are too many answers to questions that are posed by customers to dealers. Many are met with a response of another questions. Seeking more information or clarity. Steve suggested that there was a better approach to the questions that are asked of dealers. The questioner is really just asking for help. So why not respond with a simple YES. I can do that for you. I can help. I will get it for you. Take the problem the concern away from the customer.

A few weeks ago, in another discussion with another group of people, Mets Kramer and Stephanie Smith the same point came up from a different direction. When the customers come to your website what are they doing? We changed our website to ask a question on the landing page. Right in the middle of the page and it zooms towards you and away from you so you can hardly miss it. We ask “Need Help Finding Something? Click Here.” And you are taken to a series of choices available to the visitor from the website. It is making a difference for our website visitors. I had not taken into consideration that there is a such a large volume of information on our site. I know where everything is so why shouldn’t everyone else? That is what in the teaching profession we call the curse of knowledge.

Customers are looking for solutions not answer. That was my take away when Steve presented that thought to me.

Recently I wrote about us living in “The Golden Age of Information.” We can get answers to nearly anything. Just ask “Google” or “Siri” or “Alexa.” Our access to information is amazing to consider. It used to be a barrier to entry to our industry, dealers in the capital goods world, information. That is no longer true. The problem is that too many of us still are thinking that our sales force is available to give information to customers. That our sales force is a group of people that act as if they are “walking brochures.” 

Our customers do their own research at their convenience and when they are ready to do something then they call us. Alex Kraft has understood this and created a wonderful tool for customers and dealers and the sales force. He has created an internet-based tool that uses text messages to announce that a customer has a need and is looking for a machine. That information is texted to the clients of his Company Heave. He has answered the question with YES. Going further he is asking the sales force who receive the texts “Do you want to help?”

Dale Hanna and Foresight Intelligence eliminate the need for questions with their SMS program which sends text messages to customers that are having work done onf their equipment. Rather than playing phone tag to find out the status of a repair between the customer and the dealer service department, which typically requires a few calls to connect, Foresight has a system that sends a text to each customer, at their choice, of any action of their machine. It could be an inspection, it could be a quotation, it could be pictures, it is rather slick, if you ask me. There is no longer the NEED, to ask the questions to get a status update. You get that update at the “speed of text.” That doesn’t eliminate the customer’s ability to talk to the dealership, it changes what the conversation is about.   

Just say YES. A rather simplistic approach to an issue of concern to your customers.

Simon Sinek has become famous with his question “WHY.” This is part of one of the most viewed TED talks “Start with Why.” He poses three questions in his “Golden Circle.” What do you do” How do you do it? Why do you do it? It has become rather commonplace now for people to explore the answers to these three questions. The magic is that the WHY is not for the money. It is for some deeper meaning. It goes to the heart of who you are and what you believe. If you haven’t already watched the TED talk, I strongly urge you to take the time and do it.

 That talk touches the same point as the “Just Say YES” message here. The customer is looking for help. For something. Whatever it is just say YES. I used to respond to customers when they called me and said they had a problem “No Sir, you don’t have a problem, I do.” It caused a few pauses I know but the customer “Got It” I was taking on their problem I was going to find an answer. I was going to solve it for them. I say YES. What do you do?

The Time is Now.

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Friday Filosophy v.07.01.2022

Friday Filosophy v.07.01.2022

John Maynard Keynes was born at 7 Melville Road, Cambridge, England. His father was John Neville Keynes, an economics lecturer at Cambridge University. His mother was Florence Ada Brown, a successful author and a social reformer. His younger brother, Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a surgeon and bibliophile (book lover). His younger sister Margaret (1890–1974) married the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Archibald Hill.

Keynes first went to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1902. At first, he studied mathematics. Later he studied economics under A.C. Pigou and Alfred Marshall. People think Professor Marshall prompted Keynes to change his studies from mathematics and classics to economics. Keynes received his B.A. in 1905 and his M.A. in 1908.

When Keynes was young, he had romantic and sexual relationships with men. One of his great loves was the artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908. Keynes was also involved with the writer Lytton Strachey. Keynes appeared to turn away from homosexual relationships around the time of the first World War. In 1918, he met Lydia Lopokova, a well-known Russian ballerina. Keynes and Lopokova married in 1925. 

Keynes was a successful investor and he built up a big fortune. He nearly lost all of his money after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Later he re-built his fortune. He enjoyed collecting books: for example, he collected and protected many of Isaac Newton‘s papers. Bertrand Russell said Keynes was the most intelligent person he had ever known. Lord Russell said: “Every time I argued with Keynes, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool“. 

Keynes accepted a lectureship at Cambridge in economics funded personally by Alfred Marshall. Soon he was appointed to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance, where he was able to put economic theory into practice.

During World War I he worked for the Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and to the Treasury on Financial and Economic Questions.

Keynes also attended the Conference on the Versailles Treaty to end World War I. He wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, and A Revision of the Treaty in 1922. In his books he said that the reparations which Germany was being made to pay would ruin the German economy and would lead to further fighting in Europe. These predictions were shown to be true when the German economy suffered in the hyperinflation of 1923. Reparations were only completed in 2010.

Keynes’s magnum opus (Latin for “Great Work”, meaning his most famous book) was the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. The General Theory was published in 1936. The ideas in that book were very different from classical economics.

Historians agree that Keynes influenced U.S. president Roosevelt’s New Deal, but disagree as to what extent. Spending more than the government earned in taxes (called deficit spending) was used in the New Deal from 1938. But the idea had been agreed to by President Herbert Hoover. Few senior economists in the U.S. agreed with Keynes in the 1930s. With time, however, his ideas became more widely accepted. 

In 1942, Keynes was raised to the House of Lords. He became Baron Keynes of Tilton in the County of Sussex. When he sat in the House of Lords, he was a Liberal member.

During World War II, Keynes wrote a book titled How to Pay for the War. He said the war effort should be paid for by higher taxes. He did not like deficit spending because he wanted to avoid inflation. 

Keynes died of a heart attack at his holiday home in Tilton, East Sussex. His heart problems were made worse by the strain of working on post-war international financial problems. He died soon after he arranged a guarantee of an Anglo-American loan to Great Britain. Keynes’ father, John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) outlived his son by three years. Keynes’s brother Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a distinguished surgeon, scholar and bibliophile. His nephews include Richard Keynes (born 1919) a physiologist; and Quentin Keynes (1921–2003) an adventurer and bibliophile. Keynes did not have children.

  • The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
  • Capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest of men will do the wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. 
  • By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. 
  • The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward. 
  • For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. 
  • Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. 
  • Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent. 
  • The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn’t deliver the goods. 
  • The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion. 
  • If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid. 
  • I do not know which makes a man more conservative – to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past. 
  • It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil. 
  • Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. 
  • There is no harm in being sometimes wrong – especially if one is promptly found out.

The Time is Now.

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