Matthew Tripp

Human Capital Intern at C² Technologies

Talented and informed individuals will seek out those job opportunities that can help them increase their employability. It follows that organizations have a chance to acquire and retain top-tier talent by providing employees with the opportunity to gain knowledge, skills, and abilities that increase their potential value as employees in the future. Therefore, organizations should take two actions:

(1) Increase opportunities for employees to acquire new knowledges, skills, and abilities and (2) emphasize those opportunities as they recruit new talent.

Top talents likely have many opportunities, but an organization that is able to offer the chance to increase long-term stability through increased employability can gain an advantage in the recruiting game.

Providing additional opportunities for employees to gain new knowledges, skills, and abilities may seem initially daunting, expensive, and impractical, but there are simple ways to improve these. Certainly an organization can send all their employees to multiple trainings and seminars to increase a worker’s employability, but they could just as easily cross train individuals in different work roles within their organization or have individuals from differing departments or areas give presentations on their work or research. These have the benefit of being low cost, increasing individual employability, but also help the organization to have a more diverse and capable workforce. Such a shift would even help to ensure that individual members of an organization are able to keep an organization functioning if an employee leaves. The ideas for cheap and widely accessible improvements to employability are nearly endless if an organization is willing to implement them.

Every organization pays employees. Most organizations have benefits. But not every organization is able to offer its employees the chance to improve their long-term employability. But it is not enough to just have opportunities to increase employability- organizations need to alert potential applicants and communities to such opportunities for them to have an impact. Whether that means adding a post on the company website detailing such efforts or simply informing job applicants about them directly, it is crucial that an organization disseminate information about opportunities to increase employability. Highlighting these opportunities will set an organization apart and make it more desirable, particularly for talented and savvy workers.

While organizations that can adapt their recruiting, training, and job roles to help increase worker employability stand to make significant gains, those that fail to evolve may see top talent flee to other organizations. While a worker may feel secure and happy in their current job, they may look to transition to jobs with opportunities to acquire knowledge, skills, and abilities that make them more attractive employees in the future. This forward thinking planning on the part of workers requires organizations to reevaluate their recruiting, training, and job role models to incorporate employability or face losing top-level talent to other organizations.