Partner Article

Lines of business leaders face communication skills gaps

Businesses with a global strategy need to be ‘global-ready.’ This includes language skills that help employees interact with customers, suppliers and partners. Yet, a surprising nine out of 10 lines of business leaders face communication skills gaps within their teams.

Panos Kraniotis, Regional Director, Europe at Rosetta Stone says: “The full extent of a company-wide skills gap can be obscured when it’s tackled within siloed lines of business. Taking a systematic, and company-wide approach to understanding the business need for languages is the effective way to find, and plug the skills gap.”

A range of resources are available to help organisations identify missing elements from their training mix, and to develop a skills map. There are resources that can help identify missing elements from a training mix and help you to develop a skills map. The first step is to ask yourself a series of questions:

1. Do your teams face language proficiency challenges?

2. Does your company interact with customers or suppliers who speak other languages?

3. How well do your teams collaborate with those customers/suppliers? Are they building optimally productive relationships?

4. What is the range of languages spoken within your own organisation?

5. Does your training and development approach satisfy this year’s language proficiency needs? What about next year’s, or in the next three to five years?

6. Does your training and hiring plan align with the business’ long-term strategy, especially as it pertains to overseas growth?

If senior management isn’t aware a skills gap even exists, they will value a considered proposal that clearly identifies the need and establishes how meeting it will benefit the business. A company-wide talent management approach best supports the goals of the business with a centralised global training initiative, providing two key benefits:

1. Economies of Scale: if training is arranged independently in separate business lines, it will likely cost the company more overall. A one-off approach to training incurs significant waste.

2. Measurement: tracking, measuring and reporting against training is the only way companies can understand their return on investment and see if they are making progress in achieving the goals they have set for personnel development. It is harder, if not impossible, to achieve a company-wide view of this if training is being arranged independently across different divisions using multiple training resources.

It is clear that language training brings many benefits to employees and businesses. Identifying the training need and taking a company-wide approach to plugging it is a big step on the road to global readiness and one that many successful global businesses are taking.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Rosetta Stone Enterprise and Education .