School of PE Blog

A team is a group of people connected by common goals that use their complementary skills to complete tasks and reach goals under the direction of a leader who uses their skills to their advantage. The three components of an effective team are a good leader, attainable goals, and skilled employees. Any one of these three can lead to the separation of a team, but making sure that there are adequate skills within the structure enables teams to set goals and work under the guidance of said leader. Skills like critical thinking, time management, and problem-solving are some of the most overlooked skills in the workforce, and closing these skills gaps is critical in developing a team that can hold its own against others.

Closing these skills gaps can also ensure that companies aren’t losing money over a lack of adequate training and team building. For example, a lack of skilled employees could create a 8.5 trillion dollar deficit in revenue over the next decade. On top of this, only 34% of workers feel supported by their company’s skills training opportunities, and up to 46% of companies have no strategic plan to address these gaps.

Closing skills gaps in the workforce can be as simple as investing in training opportunities to address team needs. By investing early on, companies can mitigate the risks of having an unskilled team. Let’s talk about the root cause of skill gaps, creating an action plan to close those gaps, and how to train and track improvement to make sure the investment is profitable.

When considering training opportunities, the first thing to understand is which skill you’re trying to develop. There are two different categories of skills that are necessary for a team to work effectively together: hard skills and soft skills.

There are a few key differences between the two types. For one, hard skills are measurable, while soft skills aren’t quantifiable. There’s no real metric to use in measuring soft skills. They’re more something that you see and experience rather than something you can measure. Another way to think about soft skills is that they’re internal skills with external results. Things like integrity, open-mindedness, creativity, and teamwork, while not necessarily always visible, soft skills are crucial in helping teams work well together.

In contrast, hard skills involve technical knowledge that requires specific training and experience gained in life or education. Things like being multilingual, networking capabilities, and data analysis are examples of hard skills. Experience with different software is also a hard skill that can be seen and tracked for its usefulness.

In order to be part of a team and to use these skills effectively, it’s important to know that not every team member needs to be qualified with every hard skill. This is where skill gaps can meet in the middle, and each member will pull their own weight with the technical knowledge that they individually have. However, every team member must have well-developed soft skills to make the team last. For instance, having a team full of open-minded, creative members with effective problem-solving skills is more valuable in collaborative settings than each person knowing the fastest way to create an Excel Spreadsheet when only one or two people with that skill will suffice.

When trying to create or find a training opportunity, it’s important to understand which skills you’re trying to develop. For instance, training for hard skills needs to have a system in place that helps track the learning outcomes of that specific program, whereas the soft skills are a little harder to see. Oftentimes, training opportunities enable a person to practice both soft skills and hard skills at the same time. For instance, you can have formal and informal training opportunities that enable team members to learn how to handle stressful situations with an emphasis on endurance, while the initial training desire was to learn how to properly create a client-requested proposal.

While we look at the root cause of skill gaps, we’ll also discuss how to determine the right training opportunity.

There are several reasons that skills gaps remain a continuous problem in the workforce.

By identifying the root cause of a specific skill gap, you’ll be able to determine the factor that has led to the gap in the first place and know where to place the necessary training program to develop better skills. By running a root cause analysis, you’ll find the quantifiable information that will lead to improvement in team dynamics. An effective root cause analysis will:

There are several ways to help close these skills gaps, and these include:

An action plan will give you a quantifiable goal to track in order to determine a specific route’s effectiveness. Each individual training method has its own benefits and drawbacks, and narrowing down the right one for your team is crucial in making it work for you.

While training opportunities are an excellent way to begin closing skills gaps, they don’t do much more than a baseline training scenario. In order to get the most out of a training program, it’s important to measure the effectiveness to make sure that goals are being met; the goal in this scenario is a closed skill gap.

Measuring the effectiveness of a training program gives us quantifiable data to determine if specific targets are being met. It allows companies to take action as early as possible and make adjustments in the program or process before going too far. Without tracking, they’ll realize too late that the program isn’t nearly as effective as they thought.

Qualities of a metric that produces results are:

Teams work best together when collaboration is met with highly efficient and knowledgeable members, people who work well together and can find a good middle ground in their hard skills with overlapping soft skills. Despite this knowledge of effective teamwork, some companies lack what’s necessary to move forward toward their goals. It’s only by identifying the places in which they lack and creating definitive goals to reach within their team training opportunities that they find success. Developing and taking advantage of programs designed to provide workers with the necessary skills to work effectively as a team enables them to reach their goals as a company.

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