With 85 million jobs projected to go unfilled due to the ever-widening skills gap—leading to $8.5 trillion in unrealized revenue by 2030—workforce planning teams have a lot to cover. While they work on closing the skill gaps for their respective organizations, they often get slowed down due to a lack of relevant, actionable insights into existing skill gaps. This has a direct impact on business initiatives, which strongly depend on such mission-critical skills.
Lack of access to up-to-date analysis of emerging skills, job descriptions, talent hotspots, and the wider global labor market data sets is a significant roadblock to doing an effective, ongoing skill gap analysis. They can leverage labor market data to:
- Assess the current skillsets within the workforce
- Understand emerging skill trends within their solution ecosystem
- Map up the skills to current and future business requirements
- Work on emerging talent requirement trends and maintain a competitive edge
By conducting a comprehensive workforce skill gap analysis using AI-powered labor market data, HR leaders can prepare themselves for the fast-evolving business landscape.
Assess the Current Skillsets Within the Workforce
With six of ten employees expected to need upskilling or retraining by 2027, HR leaders’ first step toward strategic workforce planning is assessing the current skillsets, potentials, and gaps within their workforce. This workforce analysis should consider factors such as job roles, tech stack, educational background, professional experience, and existing skills.
For example, HR leaders at a data management company, Acme Inc., can determine how many employees are proficient in data visualization, data modeling and evaluation, and analytical thinking. To build this dynamic skills database—essential for effective workforce planning—HR leaders must leverage AI-powered labor market data to gain real-time insights and make informed decisions.
Understanding Emerging Skill Trends Within the Solution Ecosystem
The next step for HR leaders in the skill gap analysis should be to understand the key skill trends emerging within their solution ecosystem. This can be achieved by leveraging labor market data to assess the hiring trends, job role requirements, and skill demands of peer companies and competitors.
For example, HR leaders at Acme Inc. may notice a growing demand among industry peers for skills in machine learning algorithms, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP). This trend indicates a shift toward increased adoption of AI and ML technologies by peers in the data management industry. Based on that, HR leaders can take a data-driven approach to strategic workforce planning to bridge the anticipated 63% skill barrier over the 2025-2030 period.
Map the Skills to Business-Critical Requirements
The third step for HR leaders should be to map the current workforce skillsets insights with future business-critical requirements. This could be accomplished with AI-powered talent-intelligence prediction models. By leveraging the AI-powered labor market data, HR leaders can create a skill-first pathway for their strategic workforce planning.
Chart Skill Pathways to Help Workforce-Business Alignment
The final step for the HR leaders in workforce planning should be to chart skill pathways. This should be based on the skill gap insights derived from current workforce skill analysis, understanding of the emerging skill trends, and the global labor data.
With talent replacement costs ranging from 50% to 200% of an employee’s salary, HR leaders should determine what current workforce skills may require upskilling or reskilling soon. Simultaneously, HR leaders can determine what future skill gaps can be bridged by reskilling, upskilling, or may require hiring.
A skill gap today is a business risk tomorrow. Future-proof your workforce by proactively leveraging skill gap analysis-backed AI-driven labor market data to align your workforce skills with business goals.
