Struggling with the talent shortage? Here are six ways to embrace “expertship” within your business

Given the recent Jobs and Skills Summit in Canberra, the spotlight is on talent shortages in Australia. But it does beg the question as to why we even needed a summit when most Australian businesses already have untapped skills on their payroll? Is it a systemic problem that businesses aren’t recognising the talent in their midst? 

After five years of research involving more than 2000 experts and 30 organisations culminating into a recently released white paper, one thing is clear: technical experts in Australia are often overlooked as leaders within businesses, which then compounds our “talent shortage”. 

There needs to be paradigm shift of viewing technical experts such as those in IT and engineering — industries highlighted by the Prime Minister as areas where shortages exist — from service providers within a business to strategic partners. Rather than looking for leadership in your business let’s start talking about expertship.

After all, a business of 2000 employees could save about $825,000 alone if it retains its experts. Furthermore, by unleashing the full potential of internal expertise, organisations can reap benefits that lead straight to their bottom line. And importantly, this is not just a HR issue, it’s a company-wide education that’s needed.

So, what can be done? Here are six key things businesses can do to harness the power of their existing talent and embrace “expertship” in a bid to win the war on talent and shortages.

Embrace expertship

1. Recognising experts and long-term planning

   Many organisations are not aware of who their experts are and where they work in their organisation. Investing in good strategic workforce planning systems and techniques is needed so that organisations know what skills they have, what will be needed in the future, and what needs to be done to address any gaps. Too many companies have a short-term focus on their skill needs and therefore rely on in-the-moment recruitment, a short-term focus that reinforces ongoing dependency on increasingly more expensive recruitment costs.

2. Stop the silos

   Similar to the issue above, it is very easy for specialised experts to become siloed in their organisation and essentially lost except for their most immediate internal stakeholders who depend on them the most for their specialised knowledge. Organisations need to purposefully mobilise their experts as much as possible. In particular, experts should be regularly placed into teams that are customer/client facing, on product development teams, or anywhere else that has a direct impact on the organisation’s value proposition. This increases cross-fertilisation of skills, organisational awareness, strategic thinking, and the capability of the organisation to collaborate on complex problems and opportunities.

3. Transferring knowledge

   Succession planning for experts needs to be treated as seriously as it is done for people leaders. In fact, some would argue that it is becoming more important than people leadership because leadership is a skill that’s not scarce. In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, the demand for people management skills has been dropping steadily for the last 10 years. Succession planning increases the retention of an organisation’s most talented experts.

4. Make training fair

   Egalitarian training budgets, for example where managers are given a dollar amount per headcount, may give everyone a sense of fairness, but in actual fact, it is anything but fair. As demand for some skills increases, the cost of developing those skills also often goes up as well. Furthermore, the initial investment of training costs for technical skills is usually higher than leadership training or generic skills. Therefore, people with technical skills often are not able to keep their skills up to date. Training budgets need to reflect demand and be weighted towards the most important skills the organisation needs.

5. Prioritise life-long learning

   By 2025 “Active learning and learning strategies” will be the second most demanded skill. This is a result of the ever-increasing rate of change and complexity. Complex problem solving has been the number one skill for the last 10 years but by 2025, it is expected to drop to number three. That is because the skills and methods of dealing with complex problems is changing too fast. Therefore, the ability of people to unlearn old skills and learn new ones is becoming more important. Those organisations which prioritise life-long learning and put in place policies, cultures, and systems to support life-long learners will be the ones more likely to succeed.

6. Basing salaries on expertise

   We as a society need to think about what’s really important and what we pay for it. Some of the most important skills to our society are among the lowest paid — such as teachers, nurses, daycare workers, and GPs (relative to their importance versus an executive with similar education). The average starting salary of a marketing graduate is higher than that of a maths teacher. The average salary of a scientist is $102,000 while the average salary of a business analyst is $110,000. Organisations need to move beyond traditional views about remuneration that put too much weight on the number of people managed. Too many experts face a pay ceiling that forces them to move into a people management position in order to maintain wage growth. Remuneration should be based on the ability to innovate, disrupt, and add real value and less about the size of a manager’s team and budget.