As much as 58% of Global CEOs worry that a prominent gap in workforce skills could actually be inhibiting their organisation’s potential to be able to grow and develop as highlighted in a study by PwC. 

Ensuring that the employees within your business are professionally trained using up-to-date education and standards is fundamental for any industry to strive for success and continue to grow. However, a major problem faced by industry organisations is that the once high level of skill and education expected in the workforce is not being replaced as these employees start to retire. To put it simply, with younger generations of employee driven more by technological roles, many traditional skills (such as those in manufacturing) are being lost. 

With an approximated 10,000 individuals from the baby boomer generation set to turn 65 every day until 2030 according to Pew Research Center, here lies the problem of industries losing highly skilled and proficiently trained staff.

Furthermore, as the career routes chosen by school, college and university graduates are much wider and dissimilar to what they used to be, this in itself has led to manufacturing and engineering-based businesses, in particular, coming across problems in maintaining a skilled workforce. In many cases, the skills no longer exist in the same way which they did 30 years ago.

The solution, you will be asking, is to diminish the workforce skills gap as much as possible to ensure that organisations can rely on young, well-trained employees taking over from those who have retired to help grow the business successfully and innovatively. 

There are various ways in which employers can tackle the challenge of the workforce skills gap. One of the more effective ways to help sustain a skilled workforce is to hire apprentices within the business. This in itself is something which the government have strongly supported over the past few years, with a promise of creating 3 million apprenticeships by 2020. 

This is proving to be extremely popular today through which businesses agree to take on and train apprentices who are wanting to gain first-hand valuable experience in an industry of interest. This gives the employer the opportunity to educate the apprentice to a high level of skill using the existing workforce. With the potential for future career prospects with the company, there are clear benefits for both the organisation and apprentice. 

Another effective method of helping to narrow the workforce skills gap is for businesses to help encourage and inspire youngsters to study STEM subjects at higher education. 

This can be achieved by organisations collaborating with learning institutions to motivate students in becoming aware as to the vast array of career opportunities in engineering and manufacturing. Industry talks and career fairs targeted to these profession sectors are a couple of examples as to how businesses can help to inspire and excite the younger generation to want to study science, technology, engineering or mathematics at school, college or university level. 

Closing the workforce skills gap is clearly an important matter which must be addressed to help ensure that businesses can prosper in the future. Those who get it right and find their own ways to resolve the issues which many are facing are ultimately riding the wave of success, however those who fail to adapt and continue to employ an ageing workforce will, undoubtedly, find themselves suffering in coming years!