 I'm your speaker, David Brown. And we found our principal consultant, Debron Consulting. And we have been using Power BI, Excel, and Business Intelligence tools for over 22 years. And we are Debron Consulting. We are also members of ATD, Association for Talent Development. And we've been providing training and talent development to thousands of people, especially in Nigeria, but also around the world. And today we have a very special guest who's going to be our co-presenter. Our co-presenter today is Mr. Gabriel. And Mr. Gabriel Muakiafo is the head of LLD for Head of Diamond Academy. And he's going to be our guest today. So we're going to be talking, I'll tell you about the topic. Of course, you've seen the topic itself. And I'll just see if my guests can hear me. Gabriel, are you there? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to play a quick video. This just gives you an idea of what we're going to talk about today. Because one of the best recruiters, or one of the best recruiters or hiring that hires is Google. And Google has quite a bit of examples to share with us. And let's just see how Google rules when it comes to hiring employees. Let's just have a look at that. All right, so that was Google. Now we're going to look at a few things. Let me just quickly jump straight through to the presentation. So we are going to talk about skills gap in the workplace and give you an overview of causes causes of skills gap in the workplace. Five powerful tips for identifying and closing skills gaps in the workplace. We'll do a small Q&A. And then of course, if you can get our speaker on so that you can hear us then through the resources we have. And I will talk about a competency model that we've built a D-brown consulting to help close that skills gap. And then we'll talk about what the next webinar is. So that's the framework for it. Please type a lot of stuff in the chat. You can type in the chat and ask any questions. Since at least the chat works, we'll be able to get feedback from you from there. And we'll also give you feedback. All right, so skills gap in the workplace. How many of us here can say that they know whether or not there is actually a skills gap in their workplace? So let me give you a poll and just see if we think there is a skills gap in our workplace right now. There's a poll coming up now for you to answer. But before I send that poll, I want to actually see how many L&D people we have in the house. So just to know our audience, how many of you are learning and development experts? Hmm, 50-50 call a friend, okay? 33% 50. So keep the answers coming in. How many of you are L&D experts? Good afternoon. I'm sure everyone is there. So it seems that our audience, there are 25% of them are L&D experts and 90%, no, 75% of them are not. So we have quite a lot of people interested in L&D, but maybe you have one or two things to tell them on how your career started. Okay, good afternoon, everybody. And it's good to be here. Well, like you said, I've been in the talent development space for a while. And it's more than 10 years and it's been quite interesting. So going from core HR space to now, learning and development is something that is quite interesting, but it's been challenging. But the thing is that you need to be very creative, especially in today's world with the changes that we see, fast-paced changes in L&D space. And be able to use technology, your dexterity to using technology will always help you in the L&D space. And there are also resources, being able to do some research and quickly adapt resources available to you would help you. So that's just the word I have to say. That's very cool. So as an HR expert, I mean, you are HR expert for, I should guess, almost 15 years before going in L&D fully, right? Yes. Yes, so is it, since you're in that side, the other one that kind of recruits, so you recruit talent, is it a different perspective when you're now an L&D person fully as against the HR person? Are there things you thought you saw or you knew when you were HR, but now that you're fully in L&D, you now understand them better? Or could you give us the contrast between HR and L&D? Really, there's not much contrast because they're interwoven, so there's no sharp contrast between L&D and core. HR know you fully well that it's one person and that you're managing this person from the time the person come in. For instance, I believe that talent management is not just that process. It starts from when you are acquiring talent up to the time, and what they call from credo to your exit. So it is, I don't see, I see it as one body. Yeah, because if you begin to look at it as, oh, they're different, you will miss it. So you won't be able to have a value proposition that will be meaningful to every individual in the system. Okay, so we're gonna be talking about five steps so five very cool tips for managing that talent and everybody says there's a skills gap, there's a talent gap. So skills gap in the workplace. Let me move on. I would like to ask the audience if they think there actually is a skills gap in the workplace. Oh, well, I think there's a unanimous agreement Gabriel. There really is a skills gap in the workplace. And so we all agree there is. Now, typically, employers are frantic about trying to solve this problem of skills gap in the workplace. And there's just a few statistics I will share and then maybe you can also tell us how you have dealt with this. In Europe, I mean, they did a study and they study of about 41,700 hiring managers in 42 countries and 38% of them agreed from that they have serious difficulties filling jobs. And what do you think the percentage is in Nigeria? I'm thinking it should be higher, right? Yes, it should, yes. Yes, because I know as an employer myself that it's extremely difficult to get highly skilled people and you need to read that, which is the whole idea of you developing your people yourself. I mean, you just need to develop your people because they don't come in with all the skills in the first place. So that talents the five powerful tips I want to share on identifying and closing skills gap in the workplace is very critical. Another statistic is a survey was conducted by Gallup in 2015 and they pulled that only 50% of employees knew what was expected of them at work. Just 50% of employees actually knew what was expected of them. I don't know what do you think of this statistic, Gabriel? Is there any similarities with what you've seen in your long and illustrious career? Yes, and it goes more from the point of even communicating what is expected of employees and managers, you know, handholding their employees and actually communicating to them what's expected of them. So this is a major challenge, it's a major communication challenge and which we see in the workplace. Yeah. And do you think it's more to do with HR processes not being followed and companies just working or winging it, so to say, like a one-man kind of business? Well, to some extent, the HR practice that is not being followed, but again, managers may not be properly prepared for handling such positions. I mean, I work in an industry today where you find that people get promoted to the point of, you know, due to their technical skills. So they go up there and they are far wanting and that is why in my industry today, leadership development has become a major, major, you know, aspect of the work we do. Okay, I think I kind of, that technical skills, yes, they're good, but when it comes to, you're going up in an organization, you need people skills. You need to get a real big dose of people skills, managing people, because you're not supposed to be doing the operational technical work, you're supposed to be managing, encouraging and motivating people, leading people to change. Yeah, so I think I can agree with that fully. All right, so first tip, going down the tips, now we have five tips for you. The first tip is identifying company objectives. So identifying company objectives is the very first tip. Now, why would we think that it's important to identify company objectives? It's just like planning anything. I mean, when you're goal setting, trying to set a goal, you need to understand what the objective, what exactly do I want to get out of this? And so to me, this is a very important tip. Identifying company objectives. And I guess it starts with your mission and vision as a company itself, and then it now it will down to everybody and they have their specific objectives. I don't know, Gabriel, could you share something about this tip around your experience? I'm sure, yeah. One of the things that we notice is that people being able to understand the vision and the objectives of the organization is usually a challenge. Sometimes because of how these are being communicated, and sometimes there's no communication actually. So they are on the pages of documents that lie there. So sometimes people are not able to connect the dots. Again, it is important for as HR practitioners, as L and D practitioners, that people begin to look beyond. For instance, sometimes people don't look at their strategic documents to actually know what is there, what is short term, what's medium term or what's long term. Now the industry will be changing, but we'll still be doing the same thing. Okay, give me an example today when we think about in my industry banking, if I think about my competition today, I should be thinking about the FinTechs. I should be thinking about telecommunications. So that means that eventually the objectives of what we are doing is changing because these are the people we are competing with. And therefore the skills required would be different. So I'm interviewing one geek somewhere and it's no more the typical. So you come into the banking space, you find out that you need people from different industries or skills from different industries to join banking. But sometimes we HR people don't get it. So we continue to do the same thing, begin to look for the same type of people that will not deliver for the future of the company. So that's what I see. So it's the ability of people to actually understand that the business is moving and where the business is going we must be able to understand where the business is going and be able to identify the gaps that we have in-house and begin to build on equipping our people for the business ahead. Yeah, so it's interesting. Let's move on. So company objectives is key, agree 100%. I mean, you can't excel if you don't even know where you're going. It's like a road, you need to know the path and then you follow that path. Now, just like someone said, budgeting, what's the point of budgeting? If you budget at the end of the day, you're going to have a variance. So why budget? The idea of budgeting is to have a path. You have a goal. You've set a goal. Yeah, you may not reach it, but at least you have something to explore. You have something, a path to follow is very important. All right, so that's excellent. First tip. Our second tip is a survey. We need to survey current employees. You need to survey current employees. Why would we need to survey current employees? Someone may ask that question and why? Any ideas why, sir? Why would we need to survey current employees? Okay, fine. Current employees are actually the holders of the job and they know where they said the man that wears the shoe knows where it pinches. So if you want to identify how well people understand where the organization is going, how well people understand what is expected of them, then it is the incumbent that you have to survey to get information that is valid. It's going to be an anonymous survey or it will be just a general survey. Everyone knows it. How do you survey? Okay, for me, I would make it anonymous because you're talking to the president. Everybody should be sold into what the organization wants to do at any given point in time. So I will make it a specific survey and using the technologies that are available, the survey monkey and address of them. So you can use any of that. You can also use other forms of survey. Some organizations also come up with their own platforms of survey and you will get the type of information that you require to show you whether people actually understand what is expected of them to make you understand where they are, the foreshadow and address of them. Okay, I can attest to that because one of our courses that we do, I'll give you a small story. My own experience too, when we started doing some technical courses, we teach a lot of Excel, financial modeling and the rest and we decided we're going to do needs analysis, the detailed needs analysis for our clients. So we created a survey on one of these tools. So I think it was called Daddy and we did a detailed survey or test really, a competency test for staff of the organization. And they were pretty shocked that it caused a stare in the company because most of them thought they knew and it was on Excel. Most of them thought they knew Excel and they realized that they don't. And then there's one or two quiet people that they know work very efficiently at the corner and their own results were excellent. They had the highest scores and they're like, okay, kind of now understand where our competency gaps are. And others that they thought were really good were not that good. So it caused a stare in the organization but surveys are very key. And especially when they're done right, there's certain rules or ways we survey. Now for our audience, our audience, we asked them just now, have you ever carried out a competency survey for your employees? And 70% of them have. So that's a very good number. This typical, would you think that that's a surprising, surprising to me that 70% have? What about you, sir? Yeah, fine. It's okay. We do lots of surveys. Provider is not ticking the box and there are professionals in the room, I will have to tell us. Sometimes what we use surveys for is very important because if you don't use your surveys constructively, it means that, I mean for DC, it means that next year when you bring it up, employees will just be careless about how they respond to it, knowing fully well. So it's important that we take note of that when we are doing surveys. And as much as possible, when you're doing surveys, don't make it, depending on your organization, you must have to make sure that you make it as simple as possible and as straightforward as possible so that people can respond to it and move on to other things they have to do. So that's the risk. Some people do it just to tick the box. Have you done a survey? Yes, on the ticket. So instead of actually getting the benefit of doing it. Okay, I get that. So 60% final poll results, 60% of us, or it's even going up again, 64% have actually carried out the competency survey. Yes, but as Gabriel said, it's not just a matter of ticking the boxes. There's a lot of planning that goes into this. This is an important step, it's an important tip, but a lot of planning goes into that as well. So if we do surveys, then which tools are we currently using? So I'll ask another question, which tools are we using for these surveys? But I'll give you a list of tools that are typical in the marketplace. These are some tools that are out there. Some of them are free. And well, so just which tools you currently use. So if you can type it into the chat guys, tell me which tools you use for your surveys. Just type all that into the chat. What are the tools you currently use? SurveyMonkey is a very popular one. We use PollDaddy, the sound polling tool called polldaddy, polldaddy.com. That's pretty cool. I think we've tested or surveyed about 4,000 people with that. And yeah, so it's cool that we have these tools. Before the internet, what were we doing? I mean, Gabriel, before the internet, what were you doing? How were you conducting these huge surveys? Well, I tell you what, as far back as my days in resorcery and IT firm, I developed something that we were using Excel to do. It was a smaller company of about 100 people. But we were using it so we asked the right questions and stuff like that. And we got the right feedback, actually. But again, it's also a different industry. So people were more upfront. When you work with the millennials, for instance, you find out today they are more upfront in just telling you the way it is with the innocence of a child. So that helped us. So we were using Excel then. But all we needed to do was to link several sheets into the global sheet that gives us the results immediately. OK, that's interesting. Interesting. We use Excel a lot as well. I think Excel is a very, very useful tool. It's kind of underutilized in the workplace. So I've seen the chat now. People, Moodle, Moodle. OK, Moodle is an LMS. And maybe it has a survey tool attached to it. I'm not sure. Temitope Adebaris said they use Moodle. Temitope is a survey monkey. And some survey tools was developed in-house. Oh, Fumi, I think a survey tool was developed in-house. I think Fumi is an icon. We use a survey tool in-house, which is interesting. So IT guys actually developed a survey tool from scratch. Now, another thing, a very important tip. So the next tip really is, once you solve it, you have a plan. Yes, you've solved it to see what everybody's thinking. But then there's one very key set of stuff that you need to identify. And that is tip three. So tip three is you need to determine the A players in your organization. So the A players are the ones that obviously imbibe that culture. They have a clear understanding of the objectives and they are performing. So that means they're performing according to plan. Now, it will be important, in my opinion, to identify those A players because they are like mentors, they're potential mentors to any B or C player to kind of pull them up to become A players as well. So it seems that they connected the dots. Now, that's my general understanding. But what would you have to say about this tip, Gabriel? Yeah, fine. This is a very important aspect of identifying gaps and filling gaps. Because the A players who in my organization will call high potentials, or people call them iPods, are actually the people that understand and connect the dots, like you said. So being able to identify them, it means that you need to actually categorize your employees into the different buckets. Some have five buckets. Some have high potential. Some have experts talent. Some have blockers and all the rest of them. And then make sure that you identify the unique capabilities or the unique traits of the A players. Because it's actually these unique traits of the A players. The things that make them successful that you're actually going to draw up as a way or as a model for even recruiting new people when they're coming. So you need to check before you go and bring in somebody who cannot measure up to your A player to now supervise your A player. This is one problem that we have. And then you cause a lot of problems within your team or in the organization. Yes, yeah. OK, so it's a footprint issue as well. So when you're recruiting and also kind of there's like a special spice, something they do that just makes it work. And if they can share that secret with everybody else, then everybody else will move up. So I think there's this story about the best salesman in the world. I don't know if you've heard about that salesman, the sole cars. And he was considered as the best ever salesman. And all he did, most of what he did, his secret really was almost like empathy to his employees, his clients, his customers. When they buy from him, he gets their details, gets their birthdays. And he sends them cars every single year, sends them like a New Year card. Thank you very much for being my customer. And over the years, just can imagine you are thinking of buying a car. And you just see this card from this guy saying, thank you very much. So I'm so happy that you are my customer. I hope the car is doing well. If you want to buy a new car, if you want to replace your car, who will you go to? You go straight to that guy. So some things like that that I don't think you can teach in class is what the A-players would bring to the table and say, OK, these are the techniques we are using. And I think you should also invite it. So that's a very key tip. And let's move on to the next one. So the next tip, or before I move on to the next one, this is just some statistics about being A-players. Obviously, the survey will confirm your A-players to you. So an A-player could become a mentor, as I mentioned, to your underperforming staff. And then having a strategic plan around that will also help. And maybe those that are not really A-players, maybe it is just job rotation that you need. So that's one or two things. Let's see if we can move on to tip four. So tip four is innovation. That's a word that many people bounce around, innovation, innovation. And when you ask someone, OK, define innovation, a lot of them don't really understand what it means. It's just a nice word. It's innovation. How do I innovate in a company? We just sell noodles. I mean, what's innovation can I come up with by selling noodles? But I think it's a really key tip, and it's just a context change. We need to understand what context. So I don't know what context you would place innovation. Gabriel, would you try and help us with that, as far as skills? Yeah, for me, for any manager, for any business leader, should be able to recognize innovation and it's not just about the big ticket innovations. It could be something as simple as developing a new template for checking your work and all the rest of them, supporting the enterprise in whatever way. So, and again, in today's world, innovation is the key word because everything is changing so fast. So that means people must be able to be agile and adapt to new behaviors, not necessarily new technologies, not the same thing as buying a new iPhone or the iPhone X, like some people say, but what did you do with your iPhone 7? How much of it were you able to utilize? So it's important that people continue to innovate, continue to change the way they do things, identify new ways of doing things and then apply it to their day-to-day tasks and also to even the long-term goals of the organization. Yes, and you mentioned something previously about millennials. You're saying that they come to the workforce with a completely different set of mindsets. This reminds me of the McKenzie study in 2015. They conducted research on about 365 public companies across North America and I think the UK as well. And the study found gender diverse companies were 50% more likely to outperform companies in the bottom quartile of diversity. So just by having gender diverse, having more late women in the workplace obviously, and then also youth as in having a kind of diversity of age in the workplace as well. So that kind of bringing people that are younger with new ideas and then older, I can remember a tweet that said that, why do we employ, this is a bit political, but why do we all our leaders are much older than the average age? This is across the world, but of course, Africa is even worse. So your average age of Nigerians is 18. The average age is 18.3 years, but the average age of our leaders is usually 70 something to 80. Well, the older you are, the more wisdom I agree. But I think the young can actually give us a little bit more diversity and innovation or what do you think, sir? Yeah, sure, I mean, you know, every day people talk about the millennials is that's become like a buzzword for especially for us HR professionals. But if you ask people, what specific programs do you have to make sure that the millennials are engaged is still nothing to write them about. So they still drop policies on the millennials. They still want them to be the same fashion, the same way that they are. And these guys are telling you, no, that's not what it means. We want to be engaged and not just of them. So for us, you know, in the academy today, we started diversity and inclusion in a program which we have infused into our learning. And so we are, this we're gonna launch very soon and we want to give them an opportunity to those people that are ordinarily excluded from some of these, you know, the things that the policies and some of the programs that traditionally the organization has. So we want to give them an opportunity to become ambassadors, you know, for us. And I think that would better engage them. Nice, nice. Some people look at Google and they look at Facebook and they look at all that and see, okay, you have table tennis tables in there and the office, unconventional office design and yeah, gym and all that kind of stuff. Do you think that's important too, to kind of generate innovative spirit or make people think out of the box? Is that important in the future workplace? Is this something we can do in Nigeria? Yeah, I mean, there's no stopping us in Nigeria, honestly, because everybody is reading from the same hymn book today because we have access to the same internet. We have access to the same information anybody has. And so it be hopes on managers to begin to learn new ways of managing people. Those days are gone when you say, okay, do this memo and send it to me. So what prevents you from going to your staff's desk and correct that memo then send it out? So what prevents you from doing that? Why must you sit in your office and say send me this memo? And sometimes it's also bad for the millennials. They get frustrated because they are looking up to somebody to tell them how to do something. But then instead of telling them, okay, this is what my expectations are in terms of this information that you're supposed to send to me. Now they find themselves going back and forth. So they send to you, you send back to them and stuff, you continue to do that. And that's not what these guys want. Again, you want the millennia to read 350 page document. There's no way the guy is going to read that. So in the learning space, you'll find out that you are actually going to give them the learning in bits at the time they want it and make it so relevant to them always. And that is the concept of e-learning and online learning. So today, you guys are continuing today, sorry? Yeah, I said today, you find out that the mobile learning, for instance, has restricted the volume of documents and the way you present your documents. So those days are gone. And so we need to engage the millennials, make them incorporate them into the workplaces. All right, so the skills gap, as again, we're talking about skills back in the workplace and how to close that skill gap. And the first tip we gave you is you first of all need to identify company objectives. First of all, really identify company objectives before you can even measure and think about having reducing skills gaps. And then the second tip was serve a current employees. You need to understand where they are currently. Where are they before you now know how big the gap is? Even if there is a gap that you need to now cover. And then the third tip was determine the A players in your organization. The A players are the ones that have a very, very low. The gap doesn't really exist for them. So how do they do it? What are the things they're doing differently? And then the fourth point was innovation. You need very innovative ways of managing that skills gap. And we've talked about millennials and to take advantage of those millennials. I would kind of advice, give everyone a tip. If you can go online to even understand millennials a little bit more because millennials don't stay. When they come, go somewhere and they're not happy to leave. And I think there's a video online by one or name escapes me now where he used almost like dopamine. He explained about dopamine and the dopamine rush that teenagers and millennials get when they send a tweet or they send a WhatsApp and they get somebody sending them back a smiley face. They get all those dopamine rushes. And when they come to the workplace they're like, reality check. There's no tweet. There's no smiley face. They just can't understand what happened to them. Now, let me give you an example. We can use WhatsApp in the workplace. I'm not too sure, but WhatsApp is pretty good. But Microsoft, for example, has Yammer. So for a lot of people that use Office 365, Yammer is a very good, it's free. If you have Office 365, you most likely have Yammer. Just take it as WhatsApp, official WhatsApp. And if you're communicating with your workforce that way, it's probably easier and faster because a lot of skills gap is communication gap. And the skills gap come a lot because of communication. And if you can fix that and fix it in a way that is very easy to use like a simple chat tool like Yammer, I think that will go a long way. Google is always the top, top player when it comes to companies for us to kind of measure up against. And if you know about disk, disk is another way of measuring whether someone is passive, active, task oriented or people oriented. And I think having a mix of these people is very important. There's no best. There's nobody that's a B is better than I or better than C or better than S. The key thing there is understanding that you need different people with different mindsets, different likes when they all come together innovation blossoms. So that's one key thing you need to look at. So if all of this don't work, what can we do? You've identified a company of objectives, you've done your survey, you've determined your A players, you've done everything about innovation, you have a good mix of, you have a good mix of young and old, you're male and female and also someone social and everything. But still, still there are skills gaps. So what do we do? Well, if after doing all these four and there are still skill gaps, then you most likely need to hire. So that's the last tip, you're hiring process. And in the hiring process, you also need to do it properly. That hiring process in a way that actually covers that skills gap. So we're so lucky to have Gabriel here because Gabriel is an HR expert as well as an L and D expert. Two expertise and he spent more than a decade in both. I mean, almost 20 years experience. So could you share the hiring process when it comes to covering skills gaps, Gabriel? Okay, fine. For me, the hiring process should stand on the track board and you look at building capacity from the base, which is your graduate trainees. These are your people that you start building from the scratch. Then you have to also build capacity from within. So this you have to have a mix of, you know, learning, coaching and get people to move around because you can also hire from within. So that means you move people to other jobs or interview people for other jobs. And then you now do the targeted recruitment, which is your bringing from outside. Most importantly is that when you're bringing people from outside, there must be worth it. There is no need going to bring somebody that your A player or your B player is better than honestly. Because that's where the problem starts. And then when you're hiring, you must be very careful. It's not about, for instance, if I'm hiring somebody for L and D in today's world, then the person must be high on technology bias. So I don't bother myself with, oh, he spent how many years, you know, manning the training school of one organization. No, I can actually decide to go to, you know, smaller organization and, you know, people that are doing new things in L and D and then recruit the people. Then again, for those of us that, yeah, for those of us that, okay, for instance, I'll give you an example. That was a time in when people, when in my industry, when we went into direct sales. So you find that you can only recruit people from FMCGs. You can only recruit people from the resters of this world, the UPS of this world to fill the space. But they understood what direct sales is all about. So again, if you're recruiting, if your organization has a wide geographical spread, you have to be very careful the way you recruit people. In some parts of Nigeria, if you go there to recruit and you're putting your advert on the pages of the newspaper or you're looking for the person on LinkedIn, you may not find that person. You may generally go to a place paste the advert inside one funny place and you get people. However, LinkedIn has become a place that people also recruit from. Social media recruitment is also very high. So for instance, you can go to, even in terms of checking people's profiles and what they do and what their interests are. So you can go to any social media and find out about something that you're about recruiting. So also in tenor references, in terms of recommending people new hires and others is also very important. So some people have all these employee recruitment rewards and not just them. For instance, if you're able to introduce somebody that comes in and the person is very good on the job and stuff like that or is an A person, then you get a reward for that and stuff like that. So they hold a lot of things you can do. It depends on the situation you find yourself and it depends on the type of person you are recruiting or the type of skill you're recruiting for. That's really cool. So hiring is key, but there must be a plan around it. You need, you can just hire. I mean, you obviously have to have your gaps understood and then you're hiring to fill that gap. And you mentioned some things that you said, don't bring in somebody that's not good or even better than your A player. I mean, your A player also needs to learn. I mean, your A player is looking forward to learning from somebody. So you better bring somebody better and learn. So managers, very good managers get people better than them. I think if you're not getting someone better than you, there's absolutely no learning going on. Wow, excellent. So Google, let's quickly play a very short video that kind of demonstrates that recruitment process. So like I was playing a quick video and then we'll have a quick chat around that video. And then I'll recap the five skills or the five tips for you. And then I'll show you something we do to kind of help HR understand certain competency gaps. And we'll see that after that. Small businesses can find the recruitment process a daunting prospect. Selecting the right person depends on following a series of distinct steps. This gives you a simple process that you can use no matter what type or level of position you want to fill. The process also ensures that your recruitment is efficient, effective and fair. Let's look at each of these steps briefly. The first step is defining the role. You've made the decision that you need to take someone on and that the best option is to have someone directly employed in your business. Before you rush off to find someone, think carefully about what the role is, the actual requirements of the job and how it fits into your business and your future plans. Write a job description to help you clarify the purpose, tasks and responsibilities of the job. Use the job description template to help guide you. And remember, this is about the job, not the person. The next step is to build a profile of the ideal person to fill this role. Again, there's a template and guidance available to help you. A person specification will help you undertake the selection and interview process in a systematic way. The next step is attracting applicants. You need to start the search for suitable candidates. Think about where you can advertise to attract a wide range of good quality applicants. You're aiming to get the best response at the least cost. There are some suggestions given in this module. As well as way to advertise, you have to consider the advert itself. An effective job advert sells a position and the business. This is particularly important for small and new businesses because the company name may not be particularly well known. Keep the advert short and to the point and make sure it's non-discriminatory and that you avoid gender or culturally specific language. You may consider using an application form when recruiting. This means you don't rely on each candidate responding in their own way. You can be sure the candidates provide all the information that's necessary and relevant to the job. And it also makes it easier to compare like with like and make your initial assessment. The next step in the recruiting process is selecting the right candidate. First, draw up your selection criteria. It's a good idea to create a checklist based on the essential or desirable skills and experience required. Use your checklist to assess how closely candidates match up to the job and person specification. You may want to ask your business advisor or a business colleague to assist you with the selection and interview process. This helps to make sure there's no personal bias in the process and is helpful if at least one person on the selection panel has been trained in equality and diversity issues. When you have your short list of suitable people, send them a letter inviting them to an interview. Take care of the interview process. Make sure you give every candidate the same opportunities to give the best presentation of themselves. To demonstrate their suitability and to ask questions of the interviewer. Use a consistent structure for the interview too. At the end of each interview, tell the candidate what happens next and when they can expect to hear from you. When you've made your decision, notify the successful candidate but also remember to let the other candidates know that they were not successful. Finally, having made your decision and selected your candidate, there are a number of things you have to consider before they become an employee. The full details are in this module. I suggest you go through them carefully. If you follow these steps whenever you're recruiting, you'll find it more straightforward and you'll also make sure that your recruitment is efficient, effective and fair. All right great, we're back and that was just a good video on hiring and hiring the proper way. So skills gaps, so the skills gaps in the workplace. How do you minimize that? Again, a recap, identify company objectives, survey your current employees to find out really how large that gap is or if the gap exists. Determine the eight players in your organizations. These are the ones that have actually closed that gap. How do they do it? Document, help, let them mentor those that are actually finding it hard to cover that skills gap. And then innovation, put things in place that will make innovation blossom in your organization. Hire different sets of people from different backgrounds, from different likes and from male-female ratio as is a big thing now about equality of pay, you get and stuff like that. And then hiring, if everything else doesn't work, you probably need to hire to cover that skill gap. And of course, when you're hiring, as April said, you should not hire anyone below your eight players. That just doesn't make sense. At the eight player level or higher. Right, so I would like to share one or two things. This is some of our resources. I would like to share an Analyst Plus model that we've built and I actually have it up for you. You can download it. If you click, if you check your tool, you'll see you could click on the download link. So we've built an Analyst Competency model and it's working in progress. We continue to improve that competency model. And that's what I've put for you to download. So I'll just quickly show you what we thought. Since we specialize in training analysts, we think that, okay, an analyst, when I say analyst, by the way, is any analyst, financial analyst, reporting analyst, data analyst, sales analyst, I think even HR analyst, L&D analyst. In fact, I'm talking at the ATD conference. ATD is the Association for Talent Development. I'm talking at the conference, which is actually in a week or so time and the International Conference in San Diego. And the topic is 10 ways Excel can make you excel in training analytics. So I'm just gonna say, okay, how would you use Excel to really do detailed training analytics? And people have been hearing about machine learning and AI. So how do you take advantage of this? So in the competency model we've built, we think there are really three main pillars. There's the foundation, the foundational skills that people need, the core skills and the expert skills. Now these are technical skills for analysts. The foundational skills we think is data prep and recon. You need to prepare your data and do detailed reconciliation. You need the essential skills there. Data analysis and reporting skills, data visualization skills, financial analysis fundamentals, Office 365 essential skills. So these are your foundational skills, which I think every single employee needs. Then your core skills are more specialist. So things like advanced data visualization, advanced data prep, business intelligence fundamentals, advanced financial modeling, and then advanced data analysis and reporting. So those are core skills that analysts, people that consider themselves analysts need. And then if you want to go a step further and become an expert, you need financial modeling, mastery, business intelligence expertise, data prep and recon, expert, financial analysis, expert, and then advanced analytics, which includes machine learning and AI. So these is the framework. And if you click on the link, you'll be able to download the entire thing. And we keep on updating this as we go. And then you can use this to build a competency model and understand certain competencies of your staff. It's quite detailed. And you have your competency model. Do you need someone to be an emerging, have emerging competency in a certain thing? It doesn't need to be more than emerging. Or certain positions need someone developed in that particular competency, or proficient in that competence, your experts. So you could map this and it could help you map out your job positions based on these competency model. And to add to that, we have an online platform where you can do all your, all the e-learning platform we have is Office Training Hub, where we basically provide all the skill sets. All these competencies and all these courses are going to be on that platform. And it's going to be much cheaper for people to use that platform and build out courses based on that platform. So Office Training Hub is the platform. And we can actually, we build that platform for your organization in two weeks. So you can imagine, you can have an e-learning platform in two weeks. We just build it out exactly what we have. We build it out for you in two weeks and give you content. And we continue to generate content and share that content with you. So just check that out, download it, click on the link to download and we're about to conclude. So let me quickly get back to the slides. So thanks, Kibber. I just shared our competency model. Is this something that you think is useful for organizations? Yes, it's quite useful. Having played in the IT environment, IT and telecoms, I can always relate to the analyst competencies, which is very rich. And it provides an opportunity for people to, today we'll talk about big data. And big data is real. So people have data, but they don't know what to do with it. And people who cannot even organize their data and address of them, not talk of analyzing the data properly and using it. So I can relate with it. Yeah. I'll have to give people a heads up. When I visited Gabriel in his office, I mean, I was so elated because he's one of the few organizations I know that are actually using nearly everything you can think about in L and D. Yeah, you're using MOOCs. I mean, you know what MOOCs are, you encourage your staff to do all those massive online courses, LinkedIn learning, face-to-face, the Missouri needs analysis. You need to know whether or not this training is actually returning. There's a return on investment. So it's like the whole full scale of what a real L and D department should do for an organization. Yeah, the brains of the department and learning and training should be a culture. It should be part of the culture. So I applaud you for that, sir. And please keep up the wonderful work. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you very much. Yes, thanks. Thanks, Lausanne. You're welcome, sir. There is some of us to kind of become experts like yourself. Is there any way people can reach you? Is there somewhere you could share for people in the audience or people that have logged in to reach you? Yeah, OK. I'm just typing my number here. In the chat? OK. In the chat? That's nice. So please, if you look at the chat, you will see how good it is in the chat. I'm not putting it up in the public. So if you check and get the, yeah. So thank you for sharing that. That's super, super. Are you on Twitter and any of these social media platforms? You have a? Yes, I'm on LinkedIn. OK, LinkedIn. And just your name, how would they find you on LinkedIn? You just find my name, Gabriel Mocafo. That's the man. Excellent. I'm also on Twitter. So let me just share my Twitter handle with people. I just typed that in the chat. So you could always reach me on Twitter, at the Brown Analyst. So that's my Twitter handle. And yeah, so everybody, thank you very much for joining us. And thanks a lot. It really, really had fun. I think we covered quite a lot today, even though we have some free technical difficulties. It's still good. It's all part of technology. And I was just running back all the way back just so you could see all what we've covered so far, all the tips and tricks. And next month, we still have another webinar we're going to be doing. Of course, we do this every third Thursday of the month. So every third Thursday of the month, you can be sure that you'll see us. And for the Training and Development webinar, it has two to three o'clock, third Thursday of the month. And for the Excel webinar, it's 9 to 10 o'clock. And the financial modeling has the Excel and Power BI webinar. And then the financial modeling webinar is from 11 to 12. So thank you, everybody. And this was wonderful. Thank you lots. A big, big, big, thank you. Please, can we all put a virtual clap for Mr. Gabriel. It was just wonderful. And thank you very much for sharing your experience with us, sir. All right, thank you very much. And have a great day, everybody. So thank you. All right, bye. Thank you. Bye-bye, everybody.