Plugging the Skills Gap with Facilitators' Manager for Hire

26 May 2006

John Davidson, a partner with performance improvement consultancy, Facilitators UK, provides employers with some tips on addressing the skills shortage conundrum.

The new wave of investment in the North Sea has been a mixed blessing for many companies in the oil and gas industry. Full order books can mean survival for some companies and substantial growth for others, but not everything is fine 'back at the ranch'. In particular, many organisations are reporting an acute skills shortage, which is exacerbated by the rush for delivery of projects. This time, the pain is three-fold:

  1. The ageing, skilled workforce is starting to retire which is slowly reducing the pool of skilled, experienced workers;
  2. The reduction in the pool means it is harder to take staff out of delivery to dedicate to solving the problem; and
  3. The skills shortage is occurring at a time when fewer and fewer people want to join the oil and gas industry.

For the smaller company, three further problems arise:

  1. In the tight job market, people can demand unaffordable salaries;
  2. Often, the resource that is most lacking is management time; and
  3. The most appropriate resource is often not required full time or permanently.

Solving the problem therefore demands creative solutions.  Facilitators UK's experience of working within the industry has led us to develop the following checklist for the SME owner faced with skills shortages:

  1. Use temporary resources effectively - services such as interim management (Manager for Hire) are designed to offer scarce resources on a flexible basis, with no recruitment fee or minimum contract.  Use an HR, IT, HSE or business manager tactically to help you solve your most time-draining problems, so leaving you to develop your business.
  2. Train and develop your people – it’s inevitable that the skills gap will only truly be solved by training new recruits into the industry.  The smart company will be developing its own training programme and taking bright recruits into the business, training them on the job in a structured way.
  3. Manage your knowledge effectively - every time a member of staff leaves the building, so does their knowledge. In a market where people are more mobile than ever before, implementing a strategy to lock knowledge into the business is sound management. There is a great story about an engineer who left his company after a long and happy career. Several years later, the company contacted him regarding a problem with a piece of production equipment that seemed to be impossible to fix. They had tried everything, but nobody could return the equipment to full capacity. After much persuasion, the engineer flew out to the platform and spent a day studying the equipment. At the end of the day, he marked a small ‘x’ on a component and stated that replacing the component would solve the problem, which it did. Soon afterwards, a bill for £50,000 was received. Very unhappy with this, the company asked for an itemisation of the bill. The engineer responded briefly: "One chalk mark: £1. Knowing where to put it: £49,999&". Knowledge can be recovered, but clearly it is cheaper not to have to do it. Do you know what knowledge needs managing?
  4. Manage your capabilities - incredibly, many organisations don't really know what skills are required to do key jobs, or indeed what the key jobs in the business are. As a result, too much effort is spent replacing common skills, and not enough on the hard to replace ones. A competence management programme will help you identify which skills are the ones that are most difficult to replace, who has them and who needs to develop them.

  5. Plan for the future - succession plans need to be in place for people you've identified as key in the competence management programme. Develop plans for their departure either by training others to do key parts of their job, by embedding their knowledge into the business or simply by having a job description for the job advert.
  6. Implement effective IT - in the right hands, IT applications can help manage your business very effectively and simply, reducing the time required to do jobs and allowing you to delegate even complex processes to less experienced people. However, badly implemented IT can drain resources badly, disastrous when you are already resource constrained.

  7. Implement effective HR - "Should I stay or should I go?" An HR strategy aimed at successfully recruiting and retaining key staff will help your people answer in your favour. For the cost of a few recruitment fees, an HR strategy can be developed to help your business remain competitive.
  8. Implement lean thinking - rather than recruiting and retaining additional staff to cope with extra workload, do things more efficiently. How lean is your business? Where are you wasting resources in your processes? Consider how a lean thinking effort can make you do more with less.
  9. Learn lessons effectively - many organisations make the same mistakes time and time again, failing to learn what went wrong and failing to make changes to prevent a reoccurrence.  Consider how avoiding costly mistakes can improve your efficiency.

An effective strategy to tackle the skills crisis therefore needs to cover all areas of the business and not just HR. Facilitators UK has developed its Manager for Hire service with the smaller business in mind to help them start to tackle growing pains effectively and flexibly.

Further Information

Please contact John Davidson for further details.

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