The Skills Gap Is A Lie

We’re always hearing this story:

• According to McKinsey 90% of managers and executives either face skills gaps or expect gaps to develop
• Deloitte expects over this decade for 2.4 million positions to go unfilled resulting in 2.5 trillion dollars of economic impact
• HBR demonstrates the skill gap is real in specialized areas within industry

So then why do I say the skills gap is a lie? Well, there is definitely a gap, well, more like a chasm, but it’s not fair to call it a skills gap. See any time we talk about a skills gap we’re inevitably talking a particular technology or tool. And yes you will have a difficult time finding someone that know exactly the tools and technologies you’re familiar with. Being in the field of DevOps you can’t imagine how many times I’ve had to content with people that believe they need someone who knows Chef, Ansible, Puppet, AWS, Azure, Jenkins, GitLab, Terraform, Vault, etc, etc. And they will definitely fail to find someone that can check all those boxes. That is after all looking for unicorns. But that’s because they were looking for the wrong things. All that they needed was an engineer with a good ability to learn.

If we have the right talent and organization in place the most effective strategy for managing the skills crisis would be to “Mind The Gap” // Image courtesy wikipedia article on Mind The Gap

The magazine Chief Learning Officer does a great job in distilling the problem. They define the skills as:

Perishable skills : Half-life < 2.5 years — Specific technology skills that are updated frequently; organization-specific policies and tools and specialized processes all can be classified as perishable skills.

Semi-durable skills : 2.5 years <Half-life < 7.5 years — These tend to be those frameworks with base sets of knowledge from which field-specific technologies, processes and tools arise.

Durable skills : Half-life > 7.5 years — They constitute a base layer of mindsets and dispositions. They include skills like design thinking, project management practices, effective communication, leadership which are more foundational in nature.

You see the skills that are being searched for by the people claiming there is a skills gap are the perishable skills. With a half-life of <2.5 years of course you won’t find someone who would know these skills. No college is going to teach it because by the time you are in your sophomore year half the class has become unemployable. Nobody in their right mind should be learning it just in case, because the world will change before the case happens to occur. Training for perishable skills which is what most people’s concerns on the skills gap center around is never going to be able to catch up with the current skills being demanded. The training is going to always have to be playing catch up because of how quickly the skills are becoming obsolete.

Actual image of the intersection of perishable skills training with current demand for the skills // Photo by Lisha Riabinina on Unsplash

So what are the issues here:

1. Lack of information
2. Lack of ability

Lack Of Information

If you receive a resume that says:

• Hard-worker
• Self-starter
• Quick learner
• Problem solver
• Team player

Would you hire them based on this alone? Obviously not. Yes these are exactly the qualities I’m looking for in a hire. But we all know what these are and so we put exactly zero weight when we see them in a resume. I’ll spend an hour with someone on the phone trying to make a guess on where they actually are in these qualities. But there is no way for me to know. There’s no certificate from the Institute of Diligent Employees and Associates that can confirm someone is hard working that I can just check. So there is a huge information gap.

Lack Of Ability

The real problem is not in these perishable skills but rather in the durable skills. And it’s not a gap, it’s a downright chasm. Among the STEM professions the biggest is the ability to experiment and design (some of you may be starting to see a theme here). In the roles that require it if you add on people skills on top of tech skills then you are extremely limited. And this hunting for the talented people has been causing my frustrations, wanting to just make the world a better place.

Yes, I know I said I’m looking for something that looks like a horse, with a big horn in the center of its forehead, which seems untameable, and I know you threw in the armor plating for free but it’s not quite what I was envisioning when I said find me a unicorn // Photo by Philippe Oursel on Unsplash

So with this reality of skilling in a VUCA world being impractical what do we do to manage the situation? I believe there are simple steps that can be taken centering around how we structure our organizations, how we give the right opportunities to people, how we as individuals hold ourselves accountable, learn to surrender to data and quite a few other things. And I’d like to go into these topics properly in a way that does them justice. So I will tackle that in another post but in the mean time, I assert the skills gap is a lie.

To continue this series check out these links

The Skills Gap Is A Lie — Part 2

The Skills Gap Is A Lie — Part 3