Ernst and Young recently released a report that suggested companies “stop talking about the future of work” because the future is already here. Understandably, how to equip your workforce for the rapidly changing workplace is a hot topic. In fact, it’s an urgent conversation in the US, the UK, Europe and the rest of the world right now.

The EY report refers to countries, like Australia for example, which are demonstrating difficulties adjusting to workforce disruption created by digital technologies including artificial intelligence.

According to EY, too many organizations are not responding to the challenges that are front and center. The changing nature of work is increasing the demands on employees, with rapid changes in skills required to perform daily jobs. In fact, EY suggests the future has already arrived and that we have reached a tipping point. Consequently, organizations and leaders worldwide need the resources to respond quickly.

At Educrowd, we’ve recognized this and provide a software platform to help your business meet the latest demands in the workplace.

We have built our Skills Base tool to help organizations better manage their employees’ skills going forward. Responding to the evolving nature of work requires organizations to recognize that the key change is the expectations on employees and the roles they will need to perform.

Future proofing your business is all about skills.

While resilience, agility and flexibility are important traits to factor into organizational culture, the very next consideration, or more accurately, a parallel consideration, is how we skill the workforce for the demands of the now.

In a study conducted by EY as part of the preparation of the report, the authors found employers are starting to think about the ongoing role of technology in work; and the capabilities that will be required in the future.

EY also found that employers don’t have access to enough current state data to help them, so in many cases, they don’t know what capabilities they have today.

But the solution to this is a lot easier than you might think. Skills Base provides tools to assist modern organizations throughout the US and the rest of the world with this challenge, and in so doing helps businesses become more competitive and future oriented.

Here are three ways Skills Base can help:

Step 1. What skills do you have?

Skills Base helps your business develop a set of skills to both reflect what you (could) have and what you may need, broken down by role, organizational hierarchy, etc. This helps to both assist in capturing the baseline (so you know what skills you do have to start with) as well as to set targets for what you might need. Skills can be added as you go forward. This process is automatic; it surveys employees and can take less than a week to complete.

In 7 days from now, you can have an exact understanding of the skills of your entire organization, whether 100 or 100,000 staff.

Step 2. What is the skills gap?

Completing an organizational survey of your skills and matching those against a standard set of skills, both for what you need now and also what you might want in the future, provides a heat map of the skills strengths and weaknesses across the organization.

This can offer powerful insights, and it’s not static.

The system offers an automatic skills review according to a set cadence and allows employees to update their skills as they complete training and other interventions.

Step 3. How do you address the skills gap?

Once the organization has identified both the skills it has and the skills it needs, the next step is to address the gap. Skills Base can develop a training plan for each employee articulating what they might need to do to improve their skills. This can include a range of materials, both online and offline and is all automated.

Before you know it, your organization will be ready for the future; you will have stopped talking about the future of work, because you’ll be living it and winning!