Meaning ● Strategic Skills Forecasting, in the context of Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs), involves proactively identifying the competencies needed to achieve strategic objectives, particularly during periods of growth, automation, and implementation of new technologies. ● Accurately anticipating skills requirements is crucial for SMBs to maintain competitiveness, ensuring they possess the human capital necessary to navigate market changes and technological advancements. ● This process includes evaluating existing skills, predicting future skill gaps, and developing strategies to address these gaps through training, recruitment, or outsourcing, aligning human resources with business needs. ● Effective Strategic Skills Forecasting also requires SMBs to consider the impact of automation on their workforce, determining which roles may be displaced or augmented and proactively planning for the reskilling or upskilling of employees. ● Successfully predicting those necessary skills ensures optimized resource allocation for training programs, minimised operational interruptions during critical periods of expansion or automation integration, and enhanced employee effectiveness. ● Finally, SMBs must leverage this foresight to inform recruitment efforts, targeting candidates with the expertise necessary to propel business growth and innovation, supporting a strategic implementation process.
