Companies mostly tend to hire fresh and raw talent to get new perspectives and adaptability from youngsters. Not only are young people more versatile and trainable on the new technologies, but they are also affordable compared to older and experienced employees.
However, implementing this hiring pattern over the course of several years or decades results in a serious problem, called experience gap. That’s because each of these companies will someday have all the older experienced employees retire, leaving the organization with just raw fresh talent to thrive.
That’s the time when companies struggle to incorporate years of experience in their young talent through training. However, the experience cannot be learnt or taught with a training program of certain months, no matter how skilled or talented the young minds are.
This problem can only be closed with the right kind of succession planning for different leadership roles in a company, which takes years of preparation and development. In this article, let’s see why experience gaps arise and what companies can do to avoid them.
Only have a few minutes to spare? Jump straight to any section:
👉 What is an Experience Gap?
👉 Why do Experience Gaps Occur?
👉 How to Close Experience Gaps?
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What is an Experience Gap?
Experience gaps arise in companies due to the shortage of experienced employees after they retire or move to better and more senior roles. Such experience gaps take place due to managerial negligence in bringing in, training, and retaining experienced candidates from years or decades ago.
Experience gaps appear when companies avoid recruiting and nurturing the right kind of experienced professionals who could have filled the gaps that are emerging now when the older employees are retiring.
Skills do matter for performing a job with excellence. However, the presence of skills in an employee doesn’t always mean the presence of experience. And, for leadership roles, experience is as important as skills and competence.
Moreover, skills can be taught and learned, but experience can only be gained through years of hard work and growth. This means, in order to avoid the appearance of an experience gap in a company 8-12 years down the line, it should hire the right candidates today and retain them through upskilling and upscaling with proper organizational resources.
👉 Also Read: How UST Uses WeCP to Transform Candidates into Skill-Mapped, Project-Ready Talent
Why do Experience Gaps Occur?
Employees are one of the biggest assets that a company can have. However, sometimes, companies are not able to make long-term decisions to hire and retain the correct workforce that the organization demands (or will be demanding in the future). And that’s exactly why experience gaps exist.
Here are certain reasons that invoke organizations to make decisions that may result in experience or skill gaps over the years.
Short Term Cost-Cutting
When companies face a cash crunch, the first thing they do is cut costs and employees take a big chunk of a business’s costs. Thus, companies lay off their employees to meet the goals of short-term cost-cutting.
However, this often results in companies missing out on numerous mid-career employees who could have been retained in the company, gained experience, and served as great leaders in the longer run.
Recessions
Time and again, recessions have forced companies to cut down on their hiring and employee retention costs. So, whether it was the recession of the late 1980s or the Great Recession of 2008, several organizations had to lay off their employees because of the downturn in the market.
Today, those companies, are facing experience gaps because of the lack of mid-career employees who could have climbed up the experience ladder and filled up the leadership positions.
Population Characteristics
The baby boomer generation, which is about to retire today, was quite large and contributed a large chunk of the workforce until today. However, the next generation, Gen X, was comparatively smaller, creating a void in the mid-career workforce.
Hence, there is a lack of workforce in top managerial positions in most companies today. Although there is no lack of millennials and Gen Z’s who can replace the Gen X workforce, it’s still difficult to search for replacements for the retiring baby boomers.
How to Close Experience Gaps?
To avoid experience gaps from occurring ten to twelve years down the line, companies need to implement proper long-term succession planning and unique strategies. This was very difficult for the organizations to plan and implement decades ago.
However, for companies that are starting today, technology is there to assist them with analyzing, strategizing, and implementation. All the mundane and time-consuming strategies and practices can be made easy with the help of the latest tools and technologies.
Look out for the Gaps
The first step to solving a problem is always acknowledging that the problem exists. Thus, it’s important to first understand where and to what extent the experience gaps exist or are about to be created in the next five to ten years. This is the only way to get ahead of a problem and prepare for it.
Identifying experience gaps is only possible by analysing the current needs of the different parts of a company and whether they are met or not. This does not only mean knowing the current job types and taking a headcount of the employees working.
To identify gaps, it’s essential to understand the duties that each employee is performing, especially those at the top managerial level. It’s also necessary to analyse the skillset of these senior employees, their career ladder, patterns of growth, and their retirement expectations.
There are several tools available that can help you analyse the skillset that your senior and mid-career employees possess and anticipate skill and experience gaps that may arise after a few years.
Such tools help you generate employee evaluation reports that can further assist you in focusing on strategising techniques that can be implemented to narrow down these skill and experience gaps between your middle and top-level employees.
👉 Also Read: How Adani Uses WeCP to Modernize Skill Evaluation and Leave Paper Methods Behind
Hire the Right Talent
After identifying the areas in your organisation that may face experience or skill gaps in a few years, the next step would be to hire the correct middle-level employees who showcase the same type of growth pattern that’s visible in your top-level employees and who can be trained to replace your senior staff.
Understanding the skills that the higher-level staff might require after a few years would also mean having a brainstorming session between the current top-level employees and the recruiters. This will help the recruiters look ahead of time and comprehend the skill gaps that might arise five to ten years down the line due to the fast-growing technology.
Hiring candidates keeping futuristic goals and aspects in mind can be best done by using tools. These tools can help you source and screen candidates for your mid-level or top-level positions only with the desired skills, qualifications, experience, and expertise.
Using technology, especially AI, not only increases your chances of hiring the most suitable candidate but also increases your retention rate and reduces your hiring costs.
Train Both New and Old Employees
You may not necessarily need to hire a candidate from outside to fill up a senior position in your company. There may be some employees within the organization who have the required talent, skills, and qualifications to grow up to top-level management.
On the other hand, there might also be a scenario where the organization has to keep a few older employees and hire some new ones to scale them up to senior-level positions.
In either of these cases, the employees would require appropriate training to scale up the growth ladder. And, by giving the employees an opportunity to train and upskill themselves, the organization not only prepares itself for the upcoming skill and experience gaps but also makes the employees more efficient, productive, and profitable.
Track the Progress
After you have recognized the experience gap areas, and have implemented a proper strategy to bridge the gap through hiring and training the most suitable talent, the final step to close experience gaps is tracking the progress of your plan.
Training your employees will have no meaning if you aren’t keeping track of their progress through regular skill tests, evaluations, and quizzes. Learning is an ongoing process and to keep it going, you ought to pinpoint the specific areas where your potential future leaders need improvement.
WeCP makes skill assessment of your employees pretty easy with the help of automated assessment and evaluation tools. All you need is to input the skillset where you want to test your employee. And, the tool automatically creates an appropriate questionnaire for your employees to attempt. You can also have complete analysis reports with you to understand the progress of your employees as well as your succession plan.
Conclusion
The past is immutable and therefore, nothing can really be done for the companies that are facing these experience gaps currently. However, you can learn from their past mistakes and execute the succession planning of your company strategically.
Identify which areas in the company might face these gaps, hire the right candidates by using the latest automation tools and technologies, train them so they can easily scale up the succession ladder to reach the top managerial positions, and track their progress through regular skills assessment to keep up the learning curve.
WeCP can come in handy for assessing and reducing these skill and experience gaps at your organization. Want to know more? Contact us for more information or schedule a demo with us.
