Human capital is considered to be the most unstable knowledge asset because employees’ skills and expertise can only be ‘rented’ temporarily from the market. High-level expertise is valuable, rare, and hard-to-imitate – and as such, it’s in short supply. By 2020 the global shortage of highly skilled, university-educated workers is expected to reach 40 million. What can companies do to prepare?
1. Undertake a skills inventory: Make a detailed estimate of the types and amounts of skills your firm will need to execute its short and medium term strategies. Then create a precise inventory of the people inside the company that possess these.
2. Analyse how skills are utilised: Should current and future roles be restructured? How should recruitment, hiring, and training change? Should new talent sources be leveraged?
3. Redesign jobs: Shift tasks that require scarce skills, but that do not depend on in-person interaction or physical proximity, to people in less costly locations. Use outsourcing and contracting when expertise is needed as a one-off or infrequently.
4. Rewire processes and cultures for knowledge management: Cultivate specialists who have the potential to take on broader roles or to become leaders; develop IT systems to make expertise available explicitly; and invite remote specialist to join cross-functional teams and have company leaders meet with specialist groups regularly.
Action Point
What metrics does your company use to measure knowledge – and across what domains?
Is knowledge management embedded in corporate strategy, or is it left to HR and IT functions?
What is your company’s experience of skills shortages?
Source: Dewhurst, M. et al. (2013) Redesigning Knowledge Work, Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb; and Morris, S. and Snell, S. (2011) Intellectual Capital Configurations and Organisational Capability, Journal of International Business Studies, 42, 805-827.