Mind the Skills Gap: Treating the root cause!
“A skills gap is costing UK businesses more than £2bn a year as companies struggle to find workers with the right skills.” — Telegraph
“45 percent of small businesses reported that they were unable to find qualified applicants to fill job openings in the first quarter of 2017.” — National Federation of Independent Business
“Two-thirds of organizations do not have a formal strategy to address skills gaps. Because most struggle to identify and assess what skills are missing.” — Tech.co
To put things into perspective, a skills gap is defined as a gap between what employers want or need their employees to be able to do, and what those employees can actually do when they walk into work. And while I do believe that this gap does exist, I actually think that what the world is really suffering from is what I call “A Knowledge-Career gap”. All along, we’ve been worrying about the symptoms and ignoring the root cause.
So, how to treat the root cause?
We start by rebuilding the current learning solutions to focus entirely on career goals. It’s dead simple, there are many career opportunities without the right workforce to fulfil them. Why? Because the current workforce simply does not have the right skills support system to point out what skills they’re lacking and how to actually get them. That’s exactly what we do at Knowledge Officer.
Every day, our engine mines the web to identify career opportunities and the requirements needed for each of them, in order to build a Skills engine that is able to analyse, store and predict the skills needed for each of these opportunities.
Gone are the days when you learn for the sake of learning, people are simply too busy for that and would rather chill or spend those extra moments talking to their friends or slacking over Facebook and Twitter. That’s why we take pride in our unique approach to learning; career-oriented learning. The first thing we do is ask you “What are you aspiring to be?” or in other words, what’s your dream career goal. We then take it upon ourselves to help you achieve your career goal.
Using our Skills engine, we construct learning paths that fulfil the skills needed for the career goal you have chosen. We then ask you to prioritise the learning paths based on your specific interests. And because we know that one can only digest learning few topics in parallel, we have divided each learning path across multiple topics to chunk information and also give you the right incentive to continue the journey while feeling and making progress.
Our learning paths, are compiled from some of the best resources we (and our machines) were able to get our hands on. We filter out clickbait using machine learning techniques as well as our Qualifier engine, the one responsible for ranking content, which gets smarter every day with every interaction on the platform. We have also a strong research and content engineering team that strives to improve our ranking accuracy and adds a human and editorial touch to the machine brain.
While you go through the learning paths we keep assessing and tracking your skills and knowledge advancement and we use that information to build a skills-based profile that we can use to match you with the right opportunities. We are now working on a unique partnership model with universities, online communities and recruitment platforms to bring the best opportunities (Think jobs, internships, courses and much more) to our community of Knowledge Officer learners so that we can close the whole cycle of Skills -> Learning -> Career Opportunities.
With this approach, we bring love again between learning and career opportunities. And by fixing the knowledge — careers gap, we put an end to the Skills Gap!
About us
Knowledge Officer is a learning platform for professionals. Our mission is to empower a generation of lifelong learners and to help people, however busy, learn something new and relevant every day and achieve their career goals.
If you want to progress in your career and learn from the best people and the best resources on the internet, then try our mobile and website and support our campaign on ProductHunt.
And we’d love to hear your thoughts! So send us at team@knowledgeofficer.com
