Skills gapping

Skills Gapping Applied to Health Care Setting BY YOU YOUR ACADEMIC ORGANIZATION HERE HERE HERE Skills Gapping Applied to Health Care Setting

Skills gapping involves examining the demand versus the supply within the business environment and then determining how best to apply talent and training to areas which require better development internally. “ Organizations determine what skills are critical to each job and then assess people to determine the skills they possess” (Jones, 2008, p. 118). When this analysis has been completed, the analyst should have a clear picture of the operational functions of the company and how each role impacts productivity and goal-attainment and then be able to come up with training to close any noticeable gaps. For example, if the area was customer service focused, skills gapping would look for gaps in areas of service delivery and then try to bridge that gap through training or technology.
The health care environment can benefit greatly from skills gapping, especially in areas of patient care in a hospital setting. Nurses and physicians, and many other support staff, are exposed to people of many different cultural, ethnic, or family backgrounds and each have different interpersonal dimensions and personalities. Being able to provide a quality face-to-face interaction with patients, at all staff levels, means being able to be adaptive to their unique cultural values. Skills gapping could recognize all areas which come in contact with patients, assess the goals of each job role, and then assess staff for their ability to provide multi-cultural support at the social level. Gaps in knowledge or experience in these areas would be located in skills gapping process, allowing for the health care analyst to review training programs related to multi-cultural relationships or enhancing patient psychology. Patient care is much more than just the delivery of medicine, it is interactive at multiple staff levels and skills gapping can be a competitive edge.
Offers one human resources expert, “ Training and development plans should be regularly reviewed and certainly more than once per year” (Wilson and Western, 2001, p. 93). It seems that many companies develop training programs and then continue to allow them to become standardized over the passage of time without upgrading or modernizing them. This would provide ineffective training for the real-time health care environment. Skills gapping can act as a regular auditing tool within the business to improve training delivery and training program development which would be ongoing. For example, if a hospital administrator decided that it would become the organizational mission to provide more modernized technologies to improve patient care, a skills gapping analysis could be conducted to identify whether existing physicians have the credentials or know-how to operate the equipment. Skills gapping would identify any gaps in knowledge and expertise and would give a preliminary picture of which physicians or divisions would require technology skills development. In an environment where technology and process are always changing, skills gapping could ensure that all training, not just technological and systems-related, is current and relevant to the health care organization’s needs.
References
Jones, Marcia L. (2000). “ Use your head when identifying skills gaps”. Workforce, Costa Mesa. 79(3), pp. 118-122.
Wilson, J. and Western, S. (2001). “ Performance appraisal: An obstacle to training and development?”. Career Development International, Bradford. 6(2/3), p. 93.