Home > News > April 2006 > 19-Apr-2006

Skill shortages biggest HR headache in 2006, says survey

The Ken Blanchard Companies’ 2006 annual corporate issues survey suggests a growing skills shortage is a problem HR departments must address urgently this year.

According to the training and development provider, the survey points to a growing skills gap at all organisational levels and suggests businesses already struggling to deal with an increasing pace of change are hindered further by difficulties in attracting, retaining and developing top talent.

Competitive pressures, plans for growth and expansion and how to compete for talent also rate highly among business concerns.

Respondents to The Ken Blanchard Companies fourth annual poll of companies in the UK, Europe and North America were asked to define their organisation’s top business, management and employee development challenges. The Ken Blanchard Companies said more than 800 international training and development professionals took part in the survey.

For the fourth year running, competitive pressure was identified as the top business challenge, followed by growth and expansion. However, according to the survey, while the numbers of those citing competitive pressure actually fell 11%, the increase in the numbers of respondents identifying skill shortages in this area - up 9% from 2003 - suggests this issue is now established as a key area of concern.

Top management challenges cited by respondents follow the trend shown in previous years. Developing potential leaders is again the number one concern (up 5%), followed by issues concerning selecting and retaining key talent (up 4%) and creating an engaged workforce (up 5%).

Developing managerial and supervisory skills top the list of employee development challenges (up 5%) for the fourth year running. Developing interpersonal skills jumped into second place on this list, increasing 11% over the last year but down on previous years. Customer relationship skills remained as the number three challenge while team building skills ranked as the fourth employee development challenge.

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