Eighty per cent of respondents who took part in an HR development survey by Misco addressing the qualities needed for the 21st century workforce said that 75 per cent of vacancies are to replace staff leaving a company. Ritienne Xerri, Misco’s director of training and business advisory, explains how the right employee training could reduce staff turnover.

Although people entering the labour market today have extensive knowledge, they may not necessarily have the required soft skills for today’s work environment. There is an emerging need for soft skills, a need that is becoming rather urgent, given the difficulty that many employers are having in finding the right people for their organisations.

At Misco we are very much in touch with the industry and we speak to companies on a daily basis. They feed us with information on the type of people they are looking for and the feel they give us is that most of these companies are finding it hard to pinpoint people who are capable of relating to the company’s structure and dynamics.

Today’s employees are not only expected to be experts in their area, but to also have a platform of skills that have become increasingly important. They need to have decision-making skills, communication and interpersonal skills and self-organisation skills.

Employees need to have an appreciation of the financial dimension of every decision they make and be quality conscious and customer centric. They need to have leadership skills to manage their resources well, understand the changes in the world around them, how these changes impact their job and the objectives of the organisation where they work and what contribution they can make for those objectives to be achieved.

Notwithstanding this reality, there still is a common notion that soft skills are basic everyday attributes and abilities that help us relate to others. It’s not as simple as it seems. Soft skills are hard to learn because they require the individual’s disposition to change as a person – to be willing to be partially ‘re-programmed’ and to eventually become more emotionally intelligent. This is not easy.

Employees must also know how IT can improve their personal effectiveness. They must be critical thinkers to build stronger relationships with people. They should be able to identify areas for future personal development.

We meet a lot of individuals who are qualified people and have the technical skills to do the job, but they do not fit within the team. This growing concern from many companies has led Misco to explore this situation more deeply by creating a forum for HR practitioners to come together to discuss what makes a talented employee and how millennials can be prepared for the workplace.

We recently hosted two workshops at our training centre. These workshops were an opportunity to address best practices in the management of the current workforce, together with the current recruitment challenges in the labour market, especially in the light of how companies have lately been registering a high staff turnover.

There seems to be a general agreement that the skills gap that exists can be addressed through tailor-made training programmes to help employees engage more with their organisation. We have witnessed how the right training even affects the behaviour of employees which, in turn, has profound effects on the way they behave at work, resulting in the development of emotional intelligence skills.

Employers need to also recognise that millennials are unlike the generations that came before them and need to be understood better. If people are changing their views of life and work and employers want to recruit and retain these people, then the HR strategies they adopt will have to change as well. Employers must inspire millennials to acquire the soft skills they lack and implement a training plan to cater for their needs. One reason why employers complain that they cannot find talented employees is because they find it hard to understand millennials. The soft skills identified include critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, creativity and interpersonal skills.

These are not soft skills one acquires overnight but rather learns from life experiences. This is why the local education system needs to take stock of this situation, especially in a reality where the job market is becoming more competitive. Millennials are very often in a continuous search for new experiences and for new meaning in their life. Employers need to adapt to this reality and seek to achieve employee engagement at the workplace not by promoting loyalty and long service, but by promoting an enriching experience.

The current efforts to attract a foreign workforce and tap into its newly-found expertise is always a positive thing. However, this cannot come at the price of watching local talent go to waste due a lack of the right soft skills. Time will tell.

Contact Misco for a copy of the training catalogue with a list of soft skills training for 2018 via email on training@miscomalta.com.