Mastering Industry’s Skill Gap - Matching Employee Needs with New Learning Challenges

Paper in proceeding, 2024

One of the main challenges employers face today is the growing skill gap, resulting from a mismatch between business transformation and the skills needed by employees. Since the demographics show a declining trend in Europe, China, and the US, recruiting new skilled talent will become an even bigger challenge in the future. The growing skill gap has reached a point where almost half of employees’ skills will change in the next years. For the individual employee, this implies a need to take on an upskilling journey to still deliver value to their company and society. However, there is a need to understand the individual’s skill gap and identify suitable actions to bridge it. This paper presents the implementation of a tool for guiding employees in finding their skill gaps and matching them to relevant training and learning modules. This includes implementing a skill-matching solution in a nationwide Swedish upskilling programme, highlighting the challenges of creating efficient individualized skill gap assessment, and recommending learning paths.