How focusing on skills grows revenue and improves productivity

When CEOs think about revenue growth, they typically focus on organic or inorganic opportunities. What they tend to overlook, however, are the revenue-generating opportunities that developing their employees skills provide. Not focusing on your people first can cost you.

Don't get us wrong. Were not saying that CEOs don't recognize the importance of skills. In PWCs most recent CEO survey, 55 percent of CEOs claim that a lack of available critical skills is impacting their ability to innovate effectively and 44 percent claim they're unable to pursue market opportunities. Yet, when asked what their top strategies are to drive revenue growth, “closing the skills gap” isn't even on the list. Why the disconnect?

There are multiple reasons for a lack of focus on skill development:

• Too many companies only focus on hard or technical skills when there is ample evidence to show that soft skills are critical to grow revenue and improve productivity.
• Having visibility into your organizations skills and being able to assess the gaps requires investments and processes that many organizations don't have in place.
• Most companies find it can cost as much as 6-times more to hire from the outside than to build from within, yet many still struggle to help employees improve their skills.

However, there is plenty of history that substantiates that skill development can and will impact revenue and needs to be part of an organizations strategies for driving new revenue.