1. Employers need to give more importance to employee training 

Training is one of the main human resource pillars that benefit the entire organisation, misco says, and helps close the gap between what employers are expecting from their staff and the skills of their employees.

Still, 71% of organisations said that they still prefer to employ ready-trained and technically skilled staff.

There are a wealth of opportunities and benefits that come with training your staff, as misco found. It helps establish a long-term strategy for employee skill development, increasing retention, and employee satisfaction, hopefully empowering employees who very well could develop into future leaders. 

Training boosts employee engagement, helping build workplace relationships, teamwork and collaboration. It’s a useful tool for helping new employees in the organisation while also improving relations between management and the current crop of staff themselves.

Better yet, it greatly enhances efficiency, productivity and effectiveness, reducing the need for supervision and increasing employee self-confidence.

And organisations agree, with over 55% saying that it helps improve the output of their present workforce. 

2. Individuals need to take responsibility for developing technical and soft skills 

While on-site training should always be encouraged, employees should also take some responsibility for developing their own skills.

It will certainly help you in the job market, with the survey finding that a whopping 90% of employers would prefer bringing on people that already have the soft skills needed for the job. 

Around 10% still prefer to train employees themselves, but it could really be the difference when you’re looking for your next opportunity. 

Still, it doesn’t mean that Malta’s employers are always finding what they’re looking for. Around 55% said it was relatively easy to find people with the skills they’re looking for but 29% said it was difficult to do so, highlighting the importance of training on the job. 

3. What are the most important skills for organisations?

But what soft skills are organisations looking for? Well, misco was also able to delve deep into that too, asking respondents to rank the five most important soft skills for their organisation.

The top 5 were:

1. Verbal communication skills (54.8%)
2. Decision-making skills (45.2%)
3. Teamworking skills (45.2%)
4. Customer care skills (38.7%)
5. Inter-personal skills (29%)

4. What skills are employees lacking?

The same list of skills was presented to respondents but instead asked them which skills their employees lack the most. 

Decision-making was the skill most mentioned, with just under 42% agreeing it was the skill most employees lacked.

However, working towards priorities (38.7%), strong work ethic (35.5%), self-organisation/time management (29%0 and enthusiasm (29%) also ranked in the top five.

As misco notes, all this data points to a need for organisations to start training and developing their staff.

5. So how can you measure a skills gap?

Before training even starts, an organisation must investigate and analyse a skills gap, misco says.

A skills gap analysis can be done in any form or method, as long as it provides a result on what is being investigated.

Currently, feedback from management (28%) seems to be the most popular. However, management requests (22%), formal training needs analysis (20%), a standard yearly training plan (15%) and employees’ requests (15%) also scored well. 

The bulk do prefer in-house programmes (77%), but there is a pretty even split between accredited (55%) and non-accredited programmes (45%).

6. Not enough time to train? 

It would appear that time is a major issue in terms of employers implementing training programmes in their organisations. 47% of respondents said that there wasn’t enough time available to train employees, more than double that of the second most popular response, budget (23%).

Meanwhile, a lack of interest (16%) and lack of suitable programmes (12%) are also stumbling blocks for some. 

7. So what training do employees enjoy?

The most popular choices were face-to-face and on-the-job training, highlighting the importance of human interaction in employee development. 

misco also found that a method like coaching and mentoring is also a popular choice, as the nature of a training methodology is evolving over time. 

However, a mix of face-to-face and online training was also a favourite, possibly due to the increase in flexible work. 

Would you like to see more training at work?