EXPO 2020: Can Dubai Fill The Skills Gap?
For organizations to stay competitive in the region and to attract and retain quality workers requires a greater understanding of what interfacing HR and career development resources are available outside the business, how they can be used to benefit the business, and how changes to work organization can be engineered to provide increased responsibility to workers down the organizational ladder leading to improved performance, growth and profitability.
Old hierarchical and work organization philosophies and practices will not suffice and organizations that remain stagnate
and do not recognise the organization's core
skills of its human resources are destined to be surpassed by those that do.
Organizations need to identify what national resources and tools are available to adopt, adapt and use to help them identify and promote comparative performance, attract the right individuals, improve individuals’ clarity in job and responsibility levels, and align individual effort with organizational goals and targets.
There are several challenges for stakeholders:
For organizations:
- Have organizations equipped their Human Resource departments and business unit managers with the understanding and capability to engage with these new systems?
- Can they develop the strategic action plans to take advantage of the opportunities that are now available that can lead to improving productivity, efficiency and safety?
For governments:
- Can governments and their ministries and agencies properly and effectively promote, engage and build awareness of the infrastructure and resources they have established amongst industry, the community and individuals?
- Can they effectively and quickly implement and continue to improve the new infrastructure and resources, associated regulations and processes underpinning?
For training providers:
- Are training providers in the vocational education and training (VET) sector equipped within their organizations to identify and recruit occupationally currently competent personnel for the delivery of training and assessment of competence against the NOSS, for given occupations?
- Can they acquire and deploy up to date equipment, course materials and resources to appropriately reflect modern or future workplaces, or more to collaborate with employers to allow training and assessment to occur directly in the workplace?
These challenges may initially appear easy to attend to, however, they require deep consideration and quality leadership. The latter is imperative, as roll-out and implementation is often led by government. They can provide the catalyst to facilitate the change and reforms that are required and needed, to assure respective countries have within their skills pool highly qualified workers, in order to remain competitive in the longer term and enhance the wellbeing of their people. Whilst the international and national resources are slowly being assembled, the quality and speed of implementation by respective stakeholders in country will determine if they remain competitive now and for the longer term.
However, the continued roll-out, expansion and enhancement of the international and national systems by more and more countries is evidence that there are many supporters and considerable benefits to be realised. Leaders of the GCC-member countries for their part have led the development of respective systems, what is needed is the involvement, take up and commitment by proactive stakeholders and organizations.
Tony Palladino is Principal Consultant, Workforce Development at Al Rakha Management Consultancy, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Tony has over 20 years’ experience in human resources and organisational management and development as well as labour market integration with TVET and education and training leadership and provision.
Skills That Really Matter - Feature