Along with fluctuating product and service shortages, backlogs, and disruptions, employers are seeing significant workforce shortages, especially gaps in experienced workers. There are three main reasons for this personnel shortage and the loss of valuable skills and experience:
First, the COVID-19 pandemic reduced the workforce for health-related reasons: workers left to avoid personal exposure to the virus; to recover from the virus; or to fill in as a healthcare provider at home.
Second, many baby boomers and other retirement-eligible employees decided to leave the workforce, rather than continuing to work after retirement. By leaving the workforce, they have created significant expertise and experience gaps, based on their significant numbers in the workforce.
And third, many workers are rethinking their present career path and are casting a wide net in search of a different direction, a safer work environment, or a more fulfilling occupation, taking valuable experience with them.
Birth of the Virtual Office
Where possible during the pandemic, employers shut down offices, and created a work-from-home environment, which became the virtual office, an environment in which workers split their work time between office and home. While helpful and necessary, many employers have discovered that bonding, collaboration, and teamwork have suffered with the continued use of a virtual office, despite Zoom or Skype staff meetings.
Along with these shifting pressures on employers, it became necessary to transition a traditional work office to a virtual office with shifted communication methods, hiring, training, and performance measurement demands. These demands have created a wake of new practices, policies, and procedures in online services, order fulfillment, remote technical support, and customer contact. The challenge is to manage these changes without the experienced workforce needed for transition training, expertise, and experience.
Now, employers are facing rapid increases and changes in organizational processes, management, and order fulfillment demands. New hires are inheriting a lack of experience and expertise in those practices, procedures, and leadership.
Demand for Experience
Faced with shortages of qualified workers, expertise, and experience, there is a growing demand for experienced job seekers. The job hunter who has experience, is flexible, and welcomes challenge and change, is in high demand.
Three Key Strengths
There are key characteristics a hiring manager looks for, beyond the specific requirements of the advertised job. I call these characteristics Three Key Strengths and introduce them in my coaching to all my clients. Mastering the Three Key Strengths maximizes a job hunter’s adaptability to face the demands of the new and evolving job marketplace. The three key strengths are: Understanding the Big Picture, Creating Effective Working Relationships, and exhibiting Positive Work Ethics.
These strengths are not specifically mentioned in a job posting, but they cross all job families, industries, and professions. A job hunter who understands and exhibits these three key strengths has a significant advantage over the rest of the field of candidates.
How does the shortage of workforce experience and expertise affect me?
Shortages of worker expertise, experience and leadership, have opened new doors for experienced workers with established skills, including an understanding of operations, leadership, and processes.
For example, workers who have developed supervisory and management skills in one industry or company find these skills to be fungible and transferrable to other disciplines.
Because these skillsets are not always referred to in a job posting, I recommend developing and including your three key strengths throughout all areas of your marketing plan: your written and verbal resume, your summary statement, and your selected achievements.
Seeing and understanding the big picture is something that develops over time and must be developed with experience and observation. Along with learning to work effectively with others at all levels, developing team collaboration skills, and being tenacious in completing objectives, these skills are highly desirable to the hiring manager who is looking for these characteristics in potential job candidates.
By including your three key strengths throughout your job-hunting process, you demonstrate the high valued characteristics in the current workplace which has been hemorrhaging experience, leadership, and expertise. Their inclusion will propel you into top consideration as a job candidate.
Look for more information and application of the Three Key Strengths in future blogs.
Ben