Building workforce skills at scale to thrive during—and after—the COVID-19 crisis
A new survey by McKinsey Global Survey shows that skill building is becoming common practice, social and emotional skills are in demand, and there’s a recipe for successful skill transformations.
The survey says that in the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has quickly and dramatically accelerated the need for new workforce skills. The rapid rise of digitization and remote work has placed new demands on employees who, in many instances, now require different skills to support significant changes to how work gets done and to the business priorities their companies are setting.
The survey suggests that help from the employers to develop the skills will make the overall business, and its individual employees, future-ready.
Coming to the details, the survey showed how the urgency of addressing skill gaps is clear. Most respondents say that skill building (more than hiring, contracting, or redeploying employees) is the best way to close those gaps and that they have doubled down on their efforts to reskill or upskill employees since the pandemic began.
The results also point to a shift in the most important skills to develop, which tend to be social and emotional in nature: for example, empathy, leadership, and adaptability. But regardless of the skills involved, the survey found that there is a clear recipe for success with skill transformations, which are large-scale, programmatic efforts to support skill building so that employees can adapt to fundamentally changing requirements of their current role or move into a new one.
The survey suggests that the need to address skill gaps is more urgent than ever. A majority of respondents (58 percent) say that closing skill gaps in their companies’ workforces has become a higher priority since the pandemic began. And of five key actions to close these gaps—hiring, contracting, redeploying, releasing, and building skills within the current workforce—skill building is more prevalent now than it was in the run-up to the pandemic. Sixty-nine percent of respondents say that their organizations do more skill building now than they did before the COVID-19 crisis , a much more dramatic increase than they report for the other four actions. This finding is also consistent with organizations’ predictions from our previous survey on skilling before the pandemic began.
Redeploying talent to new roles—which often requires some degree of skill building—has also become more commonplace over the past year. Forty-six percent of respondents report an increase in redeploying talent at their organizations, which makes it the second most critical activity for closing skill gaps.
Additionally, the results suggest that this commitment to skill building represents more than a one-time investment. More than half of respondents say that their companies plan to increase their spending on learning and skill building over the next year, compared with their investments since the end of 2019.
Redeploying talent to new roles—which often requires some degree of skill building—has also become more commonplace over the past year. Forty-six percent of respondents report an increase in redeploying talent at their organizations, which makes it the second most critical activity for closing skill gaps.
Additionally, the results suggest that this commitment to skill building represents more than a one-time investment. More than half of respondents say that their companies plan to increase their spending on learning and skill building over the next year, compared with their investments since the end of 2019.
