Organizations that want to succeed in today’s challenging economy need to focus on building a highly skilled workforce that can deliver quality results. To achieve this, organizations need ways to identify the skill gaps across their workforce and deliver suitable training to upskill their employees. In this article, we explore how organizations are using digital credentials to identify, track, and solve skill gaps for a more efficient workforce.
Digital credentials are rapidly increasing in popularity among organizations as they support businesses to identify and fill workplace skill gaps. This ensures organizations gain a better understanding of the competencies within their workplace and can focus training effort where necessary. This growing popularity of digital credentials over traditional credentials comes from the increased level of detail, greater versatility, and retained control. This means organizations can understand exactly what demonstrable abilities make up an individual’s skill set and what additional hard or soft skills are required.
Identifying Skill Gaps with Digital Credentials
Digital credentials are an effective tool for identifying workplace skill gaps as they allow for greater specificity in their accompanying detail. For example, an individual that is working towards better ‘Communication Skills’ can show on their credential award that this includes all aspects of communication including active listening, body language, writing skills, empathy, etc. This level of detail ensures managers can easily determine which specific skill gaps need to be filled, identify individuals for specific projects, or improve communication of employee career paths and what additional skills they need to earn to progress.
The level of detail within existing employee’s credential portfolios also positively impacts decision-making around hiring. When managers have a more complete picture of what skills the current workforce holds, they can prioritize finding prospective employees that have the skills that are missing. With increased visibility into workplace skills, organizations can confidently assign weighting or priority to certain skills over others. This means that quality candidates that hold high value essential skills but are missing easily trainable basic skills aren’t disregarded.
Challenges of Finding Hires Without Digital Credentials
Organizations are changing the way they assess individuals in recruitment. Where once the focus was on finding individuals that held college degrees or minimum years of experience, organizations are now turning to skills-based hiring instead. They are using role-specific skill tests to identify qualified candidates and using an increased amount of skill and responsibility mentions over qualifications in job postings.
When a candidate already holds digital credentials that showcase their skill set, this simplifies the hiring process by making it easier to verify held skills and helps new starters get onboarded faster. When a qualified candidate doesn’t hold digital credentials for their skill sets, organizations have an opportunity to engage them by delivering training and resources with the reward of digital credentials. As candidates are placing a greater importance on professional learning and development and finding employment opportunities that support this, offering training and transferable awards as part of the role improves the employer’s chance of hiring top talent.
Digital Credential Software for Tracking and Managing Workplace Skill Gaps
Organizations that are offering training and development for their employees, and want to improve engagement and motivation using valuable awards should consider a digital certificate and digital badge platform like Accredible. Digital credentialing platforms are used to simplify the process of issuing and managing digital credentials. Organizations use them to create and deliver digital credentials to their employees, track how they are engaging with their credentials, and manage their issued credentials all from within one centralized platform. With additional features like Accredible’s Pathways, employers can build comprehensive learning pathways for their employees. These organization built pathways can include auto-issue milestone completion credentials to keep learners engaged and motivated throughout the learning process. These types of learning pathways are useful for onboarding processes that cover several topics and new or existing employee product training.
Using a central platform to issue and manage digital credentials allows employers to easily see which employees hold certain credentials. They use this data to inform and simplify the process of performing skill gap analysis across departments to identify missing skills, determine the current level of held skills, and discern where further training is required. Through integration of popular LMSs, LXPs, and other education or employee management tools, organizations can automate the delivery of their digital credentials on completion of specific training or certification programs. This eliminates the need for manual credentialing, saving time and money that can be used elsewhere in the organization.
In Summary
Having a highly skilled workforce is essential for organizations to achieve success. Through identification of skill gaps, organizations can plan effective strategies to close them through internal or external training. Employers are then confident that their employees hold the key skills they need to help them carry out their day-to-day responsibilities to the best of their abilities. By offering training and professional development opportunities, organizations stand out in the job market and create a positive, learning-drive work environment that is attractive to candidates. Using digital credentials to reward professional development increases the visibility of the opportunities created by the organization through credential engagement while making it easier for employers to maintain a highly skilled team.
Digital credentials are a powerful tool for organizations and go beyond the basic delivery of learning rewards. Organizations use digital credentials to improve their overall workplace skills and drive the success of their teams and their business. By implementing a digital credentialing program and using quality digital credential software, organizations streamline their credentialing process and make it easy to determine which individuals possess the necessary skills and competencies to succeed in their role.
Reach out to Accredible today and learn how your organization can enhance the process of identifying and managing skill gaps with a digital credential platform demo.
Further Reading
Looking to create your own certification program for onboarding new hires or improving the delivery of product knowledge? Download our free comprehensive guide, Creating a Certification Program with Digital Credentials. This guide is used by organizations getting started in or currently offering professional certification that want to create programs supported by digital badges and digital certificates.
Use this guide to:
- Determine learner preferences for training and development
- Research the process for planning and building an effective certification program
- Plan and create engaging course content that appeals to the target audience
- Learn how digital credentials are used to motivate, reward, market, and scale
