Posts

Why Understanding the Tech Skills Gap is Key to Your Long-Term Success

/in /by

The world is facing something of a crisis in tech skills. More businesses than ever before need technical and digital expertise to help them grow their company online. But this rush for talent has created the unfortunate problem of a skills gap: there are simply more roles that require technical skills and experience than there are candidates qualified to fill them.

Take the cybersecurity skills gap as a key example. In a recent survey, 85% of organisations said that a shortage of staff was affecting their ability to keep their IT systems and networks secure. And, the news only gets worse from there, as the same survey revealed 30% of current cybersecurity workers are considering a change of career path.

So, there can be no doubt that the tech skills shortage is real. Thankfully, by understanding it and reacting to the issue, businesses can actually be more successful in the long-term.

Retaining top talent

There can be no doubt that the tech skills gap has made it essential for businesses to retain their best staff. It is no good having a great recruitment procedure if those staff that you do hire have moved on within six months. Likewise, if you hire too few valuable tech staff and they have an unexpected absence, you might need to spend more of your hiring budget on some freelance or temporary back-up staff.

It is a much better idea to put a great deal of focus on retaining your top talent and giving them a great reason to stay via incentives, a great team atmosphere and running your business ethically. This can have the great knock-on effect, as tech staff are likely to have friends that work in the industry, and if they feel well treated, they might feel happy to recommend the business.


Broadening recruitment possibilities

It may be the case that you have always managed your recruitment in a certain way. However, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise in remote working and hybrid patterns, it is now possible to recruit from anywhere in the world. Broadening your potential talent pool gives you a great range of talent to choose from.

Working with contractors

You might not be aware of the scale of the need for tech-smart staff. For example, the average large organisation tracks 1.4 million issues through a single Jira instance. This shows the absolutely vital need to familiarise workers with technical products like Jira.

But if you can’t find specialist Jira professionals to hire, you might have to look at alternative options such as working with contractors. This can actually be very effective, as contractors can be hired for a specific period and simply to get a certain job done. This means you are hiring for exact needs.

Upskilling your team

Don’t forget that one way that you can overcome a lack of tech skills is to provide your team with new ones. Creating a great training program can help to upskill your workers with the skills that your business needs. In the modern-day office of flexible working, hot desking and the merging of work and personal devices for work purposes, being digitally and knowing how to use technology more effectively is more vital than ever.

Thorough cybersecurity training should be a key focus and an area within your tech and IT remit for staff that it is wise to consider throughout the year. It can’t be forgotten that staff are a vital part of good cybersecurity. If your team doesn’t have the knowledge to know how to deal with certain technical situations, investment in even the most powerful cybersecurity measures won’t be as effective as they should be. Therefore, it should be considered essential to provide staff with regular, basic and high-quality training on the latest cyber threats and what to do about them.

In general terms, ensuring that your company is digitally savvy can be a great way to advance your business for the future. Upskilling staff on a regular basis will also impress your team. They will feel more positive about your investment in them and your support in helping them to develop new valuable skills for their longer-term success.

Four Reasons Outsourcing Might Be The Right Choice For Your Business

/in /by

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Reasons for outsourcing|Four Reasons Outsourcing Might Be The Right Choice For Your BusinessBusinesses today must handle a wide range of duties, with numerous parts and facets of the business to consider. Having said that, most businesses now face the prospect of outsourcing. While it is wonderful for a company to manage everything in-house, it does not make financial or operational sense. Given this, we will assist you in determining whether or not you should outsource more aspects of your organization.

Does It Make Financial Sense?

When it comes to outsourcing, this is the first question you should ask yourself. You must ensure that the company to whom you outsource will save your organization money. Many people overlook outsourcing since they believe it will be the more expensive option. However, it is frequently the less expensive option in the long run. The best thing to do is to look at the expenses over a longer period of time, such as a year, to obtain a true grasp of which choice is the most cost-effective. After all, hiring a new employee and handling everything in-house can be expensive.

Could You Benefit From Expert Help?

Aside from the financial aspect, you should also examine whether you need to capitalize on a superior experience. When it comes to hiring accounting support for your business such as Perks, this is a fantastic example. You must ensure that you have adequate IT assistance in place to ensure that your systems operate effectively at all times and that you have adequate safeguards in place to protect you against the possibility of a data breach. If you do not have this experience in-house, you must engage the services of someone who does.

Are You Always Swamped With Work?

The third factor to consider is the passage of time. One of the primary advantages of outsourcing is that you will gain time, which will allow you to focus on the most important operations at your company, i.e. the ones that drive your bottom line and make your firm more money. Outsourcing can be quite useful in terms of business growth in this situation.

Do You Need To Reduce Costs?

Hiring and training employees is one of the most time-consuming and expensive operations in any organization, regardless of size. These procedures can take months, and even then, there really is no guarantee that the individual in issue will be a worthwhile investment and a valuable member of the team. Outsourcing enables you to transform labor costs into variable costs by just paying for the services you intend to use.

Most businesses have seasons of the year when they have more work and, as a result, more capital, and times when they have less work and, as a result, less capital. In ordinary circumstances, you would pay all of your employees the same wages year-round, as well as other expenses – office and toilet supplies, furniture, specialized equipment, computers, servers.

Final Words

When it comes to deciding whether or not outsourcing is good for you, there are numerous aspects to consider. Outsourcing is quite advantageous in a variety of situations. It can benefit your company by allowing you to leverage on higher talent while guaranteeing that you only pay for services as and when you require them. When you examine this, it’s easy to see why outsourcing has become such a popular option for so many individuals today.

Four Tips For Job Hunters

/in /by

StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Tips for job hunters|Four Tips For Job HuntersThe irony of job hunting advice is that there is so much out there that you don’t have to spend more than a few seconds Googling before you come across some piece of wisdom or another.

At the same time, there is so much information accessible (some of which contradicts other recommendations) that it is easy to become overwhelmed. Which, in fact, is likely to be the exact opposite of what you’re searching for when you go snooping for genuinely beneficial advice in the first place.

Make Yourself The Obvious Fit

When you apply for a job online, your resume will almost certainly be evaluated by an applicant tracking system before moving on to human eyes (if you make the initial cut). The first human eyes to scan your resume are generally those of a lower-level HR representative or recruiter, who may or may not grasp all of the complexities of the job for which you’re seeking. Looking at things like Resume 101 reviews can really help you to get your resume in the right order.

You also need to make sure you are showcasing your strengths, perhaps by including some of your portfolio or latest publications.

During Your Job Search, Don’t Limit Yourself To Online Applications

Do you want your job search to last forever? So, you should continue to rely only on online applications. Do you want to speed up this bad boy? Don’t give up after you’ve applied online for that job. Begin by locating and then endearing yourself to people who work at the company of interest. Set up informational interviews with potential peers. Ask a couple of questions to an internal recruiter. Get on the radar of the people who can help you get an interview.

You Need To Be Interesting

Don’t get me wrong: you must always present yourself as polished, eloquent, and professional during your job search. Many individuals, however, interpret this as Must. Be. Boring.

Wrong, wrong, and again. Understand that few people are recruited because they had perfect white space on their cover letters, knew all of the “right” interview questions, or employed extremely safe, common cliches throughout their resumes. All of this precision will make you appear manufactured and unnatural. Instead, allow yourself to be both polished and appealing. Candidates who are memorable and likeable are usually invariably the ones who advance.

Remember To Be Polite

If it comes between you and another person for a position and you are both head-to-head with skills, fit, and qualifications you need to remember to be polite. You can almost guarantee that you will get the job offer if you send a personal thank you to your interviewers and the other person sends nothing.

Finally, keep in mind that the interviewer is much more interested in what you can accomplish for them than in what you want out of the agreement. Certainly, once you’ve shown your worth, they’ll be quite interested in what you desire. However, during the interview, you must show why it is a good business decision to recruit you.

These tips should help with your job search and securing a few job offers. Do you have any more tips that should be included? Please add them to the comments below.

Creating Employee Benefits Programs

/in /by

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Employee Benefits Programs|Creating Employee Benefits ProgramsDuring these challenging times, organizations are scrambling to recruit, motivate, and retain talent. One important way to gain a competitive edge is by knowing which benefits these days matter to your people the most.

How you’re supporting your employees, current and future, in this topsy-turvy environment can mean the difference between a loyal and resilient workforce and one that’s noncommitted – to you or its work.

So, you must put a premium on setting up the best benefits program possible. After all, benefits are a key component of the overall compensation package. Here’s what you need to know about creating employee benefits programs.

A Budget Must Be Established

Regardless of what kinds of benefits you offer, you’re going to have to figure out how much you can spend on a benefits package. This amount will be based on how much you can handle and what employers are offering as standard.

When calculating your budget, it’s crucial that you conduct a cost analysis per benefit. To help guide you, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps data on all the differing amounts that employers shell out for various kinds of employee benefits such as health, dental, and vision insurance; FSA and HSA; retirement planning; commuter benefits; and life and disability insurance.

There Must Be Decisions About What to Include

Now you must figure out what goes into your plan. Employers usually choose among medical, dental, vision benefits; paid time off; retirement savings options; FSAs or HSAs; life and disability insurance; and work/life balance perquisites.

Note that while you aren’t required to provide all the above, those elements are still considered the basics, when it comes to benefits plans. More and more, to get a leg up on rivals, organizations are expected to go beyond the fundamentals and offer creative employee experiences such as free yoga classes or daycare services, pet-friendly workplaces, or free workplace snacks and drinks.

Total Compensation Must Be Determined

In addition to the paycheck and requisite benefits, total compensation lumps in employee compensation such as any commissions, bonuses, child-care and tuition assistance, profit-sharing distributions, IT reimbursements such as personal computer, public transit credit, employee assistance programs, or gym or club membership.

The Plan Needs Rechecking

Now that you’ve gone through all the major steps, scour the plan before you put it in place. If you aren’t using an external resource such as Mercer to help you, you’ll have to contact healthcare providers on your own to find the best employee benefit programs for your organization.

The Plan Gets Launched

Congratulations, as you’re now ready to communicate to your employees not only what has been developed, but how and why. This means that after notifying your staffers of the plan, but you’ll need to provide details and give people a chance to ask questions. Then you need to publish the program so that employees have a portal or some place to return to for points of clarification.

You should also be certain to add your new top benefits to your company’s online career page where prospective talent can see it. The new benefits should also be included in your job advertisements. After all, a Glassdoor survey found that about half of jobseekers reported being frustrated by the lack of online info about an organization’s benefits.

As you can see, creating an employee benefits program is more than a notion, but at least now you know what goes into it. To put a program in place, we recommend not only that you get outside help, but that you go with the consultant Mercer for its breadth of experience and expertise. The firm will work with you to produce health and benefits solutions that will benefit your employees and their families, as well as your organization.

4 Business Services To Outsource In 2022

/in /by

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Outsource|4 Business Services To Outsource In 2022Throughout the turbulent, unpredictable, and often even distressing business climate the worldwide coronavirus pandemic has, and is continuing to cause, if you are either the owner or manager of a business that has continued to trade then you are to be commended.

With the Covid-19 pandemic still exceedingly prevalent as the new year arrives, it is time to start buying yourself more time to give attention to the areas of concern within your business model. With that being said, continue reading to learn of the top four business services to outsource in 2022.

1. Recruitment Processes

Recruiting and hiring for new staff is one of the most time-consuming and vital responsibilities of running a business and as a result, outsourcing the entirety of your recruitment management is one of the best decisions you could possibly make.
The primary advantages of outsourcing your business’s main recruitment processes include the simple fact that it makes it easier to run the fundamentals of your business, the beneficial assistance gained from industry experts, and the fact that the right hire means your business is more likely to succeed in growth and expansion.

2. Social Media Management

Whether you like it or not, social media is a prominent, and possibly even necessary, tool in running a business—regardless of industry—in the modern world.

Content across all of your social media platforms should be consistent, uniform, and most importantly, exceedingly engaging so as to entice both recurring custom as well as new consumers of your products or services.

As successful social media management requires such a lot of time and effort to be spent on it, outsourcing this service often results in a large intake of new customers to a business. Other benefits of outsourcing social media management include the injection of fresh content and ideas, the delivery of immediate and effective results, the important saving of cash monies, and the enormous amount of time you will save to focus on other areas of the company.

StrategyDriven's 45 Minute Business Accelerators eBook

3. Vertical Transportation Systems’ Inspections

Obviously, one of the principal roles of a business owner or manager is to ensure the safety of every single employee and customer who enters your business premises, and the best way to do this is to ensure you have everything inspected as regularly as possible.

When it comes to your vertical transportation inspections, it makes perfect sense to outsource everything related to each system to ensure optimum safety, performance, and compliance, and professional escalator companies will deliver unrivaled services every single time.

4. Website Design

In 2022, especially due to more and more consumers choosing to shop online, your company’s official website needs to be as simultaneously aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly as possible.
Outsourcing your website design and maintenance will mean you will benefit from cost-effective yet professional assistance, save valuable resources, and of course save that much-valued commodity of time—not to mention unprecedented access to the latest and most innovative technologies to make your website as professional as possible.