Forecasting Future Skills Requirements in the Workforce

Vodafone

Future skills gap analysis

Approach

Impact

A multinational telecoms giant needed to understand and align employee skills for future market requirements

Keeping employees skills aligned with the evolving nature of business can be challenging and time-consuming. It raises several questions as to what skillsets are required, how will these change over time and how these be embedded into organisational culture.

In this instance, a telecoms giant wanted to understand the future landscape and skills requirements for their procurement division. The division had been consolidated into two locations in the UK and Luxembourg and there was an overlap of skills but also the structure and skillset of the division was not consistent with a changing landscape. The remit was to understand current working practices, forecast how the landscape would change over the medium term and recommend approaches to proactively stay ahead of the evolution curve.

• Understand current landscape and culture

• Modified Delphi approach and research to forecast future landscape

• Modelling of future skills requirement

• Skills gap analysis

The outcome was an approach for the company to adopt that provided a pathway for the division to evolve its personnel skills and traits that would enable it to stay ahead of the evolution curve, remain at the forefront of the industry and push forward a sustainability agenda that could be market-leading. It enabled the Learning and Development Team to construct new modules as part of their learning academy to proactively address gaps that would emerge if negated.