As the job market has evolved, so too have the skills required of seekers. But when 75% of human resources professionals say a skills shortage has made recruiting particularly challenging in recent months, it would appear as though the workforce hasn’t quite kept pace. Now LinkedIn is stepping in to help close the gap.



On Tuesday, the professional social network announced the launch of a “Skills Assessments” tool, through which users can put their knowledge to the test. Those who pass are given the opportunity to display a badge that reads “passed” next to the skill on their profile pages, a validation of sorts that LinkedIn hopes will encourage skills development among its users and help better match potential employees with the right employers. &nbsp;



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“We see an evolving labor market and much more sophistication in how recruiters and hiring managers look for skills. &#8230; We also see a changing learning market,” says Hari Srinivasan, senior director of product management at LinkedIn Learning. “The combination of those two made us excited about changing our opportunity marketplace to make the hiring side and the learning side work better together.” 



So how exactly does it work? Let’s say a user wants to showcase her proficiency in Microsoft Excel. Rather than simply listing “Excel” in the skills section of her profile, she can take a multiple-choice test to demonstrate the extent to which she is an expert. 



If she aces the test, not only will a badge verifying her aptitude will appear on her profile, but she will be more likely to surface in searches by recruiters, who can search for candidates by skill in the same way they might do so by college or employer. If she fails, she can take the test again, but she’ll have to wait a few months—plenty of time to develop her skillset. &nbsp;&nbsp;



The tool has been in beta mode since March, and while just 2 million people have used it—a mere fraction of LinkedIn’s 630 million members—early results seem promising. According to LinkedIn, members who’ve completed skills assessments have been nearly 30% more likely to land jobs than their counterparts who did not take the tests.



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“This has been a really good way for members to represent what they know, what they are good at,” says Emrecan Dogan, LinkedIn group product manager.



While new to LinkedIn, the practice of assessing candidates’ skills has been a standard among hiring managers for decades. But when research commissioned by LinkedIn revealed that 69% of employees feel that skills have become more important to recruiters than education, LinkedIn felt as though this was the time to give job seekers the opportunity to prove themselves from the get-go.



As important as the hard skills that members can put to the test through LinkedIn’s new tool may be, Dawn Fay, senior district president at recruiting firm Robert Half, encourages those on both side of the job search not to forget the importance of soft skills. “You wouldn’t want to rule somebody in or out just based on how they did on one particular skill assessment,” she says. 



“Have another data point that you can use, question people about how they did on something and see if it’s something that can feed into the puzzle to find out if somebody is going to be a good fit.”



-Samantha Todd; Forbes

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How LinkedIn Is Looking To Help Close The Ever-Growing Skills Gap

More entrepreneurs are committing to closing the skills gap
in Africa’s future job market.



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In 2015, an image of a young man, Tankiso Motaung, at a street corner in the middle of Sandton, Johannesburg, holding up a placard, went viral. On the sign were the words, “I have a BTech in electrical engineering. Please help. I need a job,” along with his contact number. 



The following year, an image circulated on social media of Anthea Malwandle, a young chemical engineering graduate, standing by the traffic lights, similarly, begging for a job. 



What is the future of work in a digitally-led world? Is it
this dismal?



The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2018 Future Of Jobs Report, reveals nearly 50% of companies expect digitization will lead to a reduction in their full-time workforce. It further estimates that by 2022, 75 million jobs globally would taper off as a consequence of digital business transformation.  



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South Africa’s unemployment rate is already high. Motaung
and Malwandle represent more than 50% of our youth that are unemployed. And
according to Statistics South Africa, one out of three graduates will,
likewise, enter the job market without any economic prospects.



But Nedbank economist, Isaac Matshego, is full of optimism.
He is of the opinion that the initial job losses will be temporary. 



“As humans get better acquainted and familiar with the new
way of doing things and incorporating the new economic methods of production,
we often see a net benefit to humanity overall,” he says.



More so, Matshego advocates that at the beginning,
digitization actually requires human skills and so does the maintenance of the
technology. 



“That means we have to train our information technology staff,” he elaborates. 



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The good news is that digital and other tech innovations will directly and indirectly produce new sources of work. The WEF report further suggests that 133 million new jobs may be created by 2022, thanks to industry 4.0. 



But, for these opportunities to scale to the extent needed to address South Africa’s current employment crisis, there needs to be a strong supply of quality skills – spanning foundational skills like basic numeracy and literacy, through to advanced tech skills, according to Mark Schoeman, a manager of youth and technology at economic consulting firm Genesis Analytics.



“The first hurdle South Africa has to overcome is closing the skills gap in the short-term. There are an insufficient number of graduates with key skills in STEM being produced by educational pathways, and a qualification-job mismatch which sees graduates taking up work that does not reflect their qualification,” he says. Schoeman asserts this gap is an impediment to the country’s ability to realize new economic opportunities brought forth by technology. 



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Government and private interventions have been made to
ensure young people are training and learning critical skills to thrive in the
changing world of work.



Heeding this call is WeThinkCode, one of the organizations
fixated on future-proofing the youth. A non-profit, new-age technology school,
WeThinkCode, led by Managing Director, Nyaradzai Samushanga, seeks to eradicate
unemployment in the ‘tech’ economy by providing youth with skills sought after
in the new world of work. 



Headquartered in Johannesburg, the tuition-free school was
founded in 2016 by three South Africans: Arlene Mulder, Yossi Hasson, Justinus
Adriaanse and French citizen, Camille Agon. The institution enrols 430 students
aged 17 – 35 years who are taught technical skills in software development
including programming, graphics and algorithms. 



“We do not measure success when students graduate. We
measure success as placement at employment,” says Samushanga. 



“All our graduates have been placed into permanent employment with a minimum entry-level salary of R20,000 ($1,408) per month… It is taking someone who could’ve fallen in between the cracks, and now they are a highly-skilled worker,” says Samushanga. 



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More entrepreneurs are committing to the cause of closing the skills gap in Africa’s job market. Audrey Patricia Cheng, 25, the co-founder and CEO of Moringa School in Nairobi, Kenya, says: “We realized there was a massive gap in terms of access and also quality education. And we are seeing a massive rise in the number of jobs around technical skills because many companies are moving to the digital space.” 



Since its inception in 2015, Moringa School has since trained close to 2,000 students with the necessary digital skills. Cheng is confident the continent is moving to a future where Africans would be creators of technology rather than just consumers.

Tag: skills gap

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How LinkedIn Is Looking To Help Close The Ever-Growing Skills Gap

Creators Rather Than Consumers