How to Find, Keep, Replace, and Reskill Talent
People make companies; talented people make better and more successful companies.
But the endless cycle to find, nurture, train, retain, and replace talent has been exacerbated by the pandemic’s Great Resignation, the new flexible work/back-to-the-office controversy, deterioration of corporate loyalty, and the increasing speed of technological innovation.
Angelique Bellmer Krembs, chief marketing officer of the A.Team, and David Jimenez, managing director CPG of Softtek, discussed these and other gnawing talent gap issues and the recently released Future of Jobs 2023 report from the World Economic Forum at the League of Leaders meeting earlier this month at the Amazon Ads Building in New York.
The League of Leaders is a cross-functional gathering of business and IT leaders in retail and consumer goods who meet quarterly to exchange ideas on a range of trends. Learn more about how to get involved.
“These are what CEOs are worried about, these are the talent gaps that they’ve identified that’s going to hold them back in the future,” summarized session moderator Patrick Fitzmaurice, Head Farmer/CEO, Caterpillar Farm, Inc.
“What are the core skills that have to happen? Analytic thinking, creative thinking, regional resilience, flexibility – these are things that the report says, ‘look, we have to build those skills among our talent.’ How many of you spend your time teaching your teams how to be creative? Where might we have to reskill people? How do we keep upskilling people given how the world is changing?”
Jimenez believed discussing skill sets is a follow-up question, however. “The question is not if we have the right talent. The question is, do we have enough talent? And the answer to that is absolutely no. The question is, how do we get to enough talent?”
One still largely untapped source of talent is women, who have been leaving rather than entering or re-entering the workforce. “The stats still say that, at least in our industry, women have been at the same percentage for the last like six years, which has never gotten over 20%,” Jimenez stated.
Bellmer Krembs, co-founder of the Band of Sisters and co-author of “You Should Smile More: How to Dismantle Gender Bias in the Workplace,” cited a recent McKinsey study that found that women are leaving leadership positions at a higher rate than ever before.
“Why are women not getting promoted? Why are women leaving faster than we can hire them?” Bellmer Krembs rhetorically asked, noting conscious and unconscious bias, lack of access to informal “old boys” networks, and fractional work limiting apprenticeships for women among the many reasons.
“It’s all the unconscious things that make women not feel welcome,” Bellmer Krembs additionally asserted, citing gender research from the Air Force Research Laboratory that supported the need for more women in leadership.
“It comes down to specific little things, the unconscious things that make women not feel welcome. A lot of that is up to leaders to role model behaviors. Once you’re aware, a little awareness goes a long way.”
The assembled panelists and League of Leader executives agreed that effectively addressing the myriad talent gap problems involves multiple, long-term solutions and investments, including apprenticeships, sponsorships, mentoring, encouraging creative as well as analytical thinking, and especially, to keep talent, technology reskilling.
“Development is going to be constant,” Jimenez insisted. “It used to be something like 5-7 years that technologies were changing. Now it’s three, it’s four. I don't think that any company, whether it’s CPG, retail, finance, in whatever industry, I don’t think they’re going to have a good enough IT development program in the medium or long term because there is no way they’re gonna invest the millions of dollars that you need to invest in retrain every two years.
“You cannot hire yourself out of the talent shortage,” Jimenez added, “so we need to really start thinking about reskilling and retooling developing talent.”
