HR TECHNOLOGY IAN HULME
How AI can address skills shortages Ian Hulme, IBM New Zealand Business Transformation Services Leader, shares insights into how technology is offering new ways to solve the problem of scarce talent.
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he combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and immigration changes in New Zealand has placed extraordinary pressure on HR departments to ensure they have the right talent to support their companies’ growth strategies. In a recent IBM survey across nine countries, including New Zealand, more than one-in-four employees said they were looking to change jobs in 2021. In fact, more than 60 per cent of this subgroup had already switched companies in January. And when asked what employers should provide to engage staff, 51 per cent of respondents identified work–life balance and 43 per cent identified career advancement opportunities as their top priorities. Fortunately, technology has made it possible to easily link employees to jobs based on knowledge of their skills and how those skills align with opportunities. One main innovation that promises to make finding people 32
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with the right skills easier for HR professionals is artificial intelligence (AI). But how can AI help when it comes to managing people?
Knowing your skills
AI offers HR departments a valuable tool for processing and understanding vast amounts of data that can help them streamline hiring processes and find the right talent faster. It can do this by enabling HR teams to know employees’ skills, match skills to roles and provide clear learning and career paths. It can also help organisations create a heat map showing the skills pool the company has. One challenge in finding talent internally is the lack of true visibility of the skills your people have. While you may know an employee’s skills based on their current role, they might have other capabilities that can benefit your company. Many organisations rely on employee self-assessments to know their people’s skills. But even with internal validation, managers may over-rate or under-rate employee skills because they often might not have time to audit the self-evaluations carefully. There’s also the fact that assessment processes can easily – and frequently – become outdated.
Encouraging employees to gain the right skills
It’s vital to be clear about which skills will bring value to your business. Without such visibility, it may be hard to know how you can better use your employees’ capabilities in different roles and nudge them to develop or use the skills that your company now needs. To deal with this problem, IBM has been using an AI-based job architecture that shows roles across our organisation. It also shows the skills and capabilities that each of those roles requires. All the employees in the company have access to this, so if we want to move to another role, we know the skillset desired.
Linking learning to future opportunities
Once you have a clear understanding of your critical skills, how do you help your people in those areas? This is where visibility of learning and career paths become important. Your employees can spend many hours learning and trying to acquire new skills, but if you don’t link their efforts to future mobility or recognition, what are they learning for? With AI’s capabilities, you can gain insights into what employees
