Your Resource for Sensible Skills Gap Solutions
Need innovative answers to build your future workforce or leadership team? Want faster fixes for talent shortages?
Keynote Speaker
Struggling to recruit & retain next generation employees?
Energize your company or association meeting with practical solutions for building & retaining an engaged workforce. Reduce the costs of critical skill shortages.
Workshops
Are skill shortages limiting your company’s growth?
Improving knowledge transfer and limiting the loss of essential capabilities is key to your organization’s future performance.
Coaching & Consulting
Are you struggling to implement skills gap solutions?
Work with us to design and execute initiatives that improve recruiting, development & retention of your top talent.
Skills Gap Solutions
Living with critical skill shortages has become the “new normal.” Every leader has to learn to live with and minimize the performance impacts of not having enough of the specialized capabilities needed to sustain and grow the business. But every skills gap problem occurs in a unique industry and geographic context that suggests a range of solutions.
Our broad experience with clients in sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, supply chain and aerospace gives us insights into many options. The solutions we promote are practical, customized and cost-effective. They respect the unique challenges posed by your, strategic objectives, the distinctive characteristics of your workforce and geographic location.
Managing Organizational Change: Making Talent Innovation Pay Off
We provide frameworks, processes and tactics for managing change to get results faster, keeping initiatives on track through executive coaching, diagnostic interviews and facilitated meetings. We can help you:
- Clarify sponsor’s roles & responsibilities
- Create & sustain urgency needed to address skills gaps
- Clarify your vision & objectives
- Communicate about new initiatives
- Remove barriers to change
- Deal with resistance
- Implement sustainable changes
Grow Strategic Selling Skills
Your customers need help delivering in fast-changing, complex markets, but your sales force is still selling features and benefits. Do your sales reps lack the strategic selling skills to make your firm’s aggressive revenue targets?
We can close this capability gap with highly-customized training programs that increase your team’s confidence and capacity to sell more strategic solutions to drive business growth.
Develop Leaders Faster
The leadership pipeline in business today is dangerously thin! You need practical solutions to:
- Recruit and retain young high potential leaders
- Identify new leadership skills needed for the future
- Develop leaders much faster than in the past
- Implement realistic succession plans in small and mid-sized organizations
- Create practical leadership development programs
We provide CEOs, line executives and association directors innovative, cost-effective ways to develop tomorrow’s leaders in today’s economy.
How Can We Help You?
Entertaining keynote speaker delivers practical, customized programs.
David is a highly sought after speaker who engages and educates audiences about innovative solutions for problems caused by the loss or shortage of essential skills.
Every program is highly-customized to meet the specific needs of your audience and industry. Executives and professionals participating in David’s presentations come away energized with a new sense of urgency, specific tools to tackle the threats they face, and knowledge of clear action steps.
Interactive workshops accelerate learning and produce realistic action plans
We deliver uniquely customized onsite workshops or webinars on specific topics, such as managing change, mentoring, diagnosing and prioritizing skills gap risks, leadership development, and strategic selling. Every session is designed to address the specific needs and challenges facing participants in your organization. We do extensive pre-interviewing with participants and leaders and often develop custom case studies that address central problems facing the organization.
Collaborating to apply tools, develop processes and implement change
Leaders sometimes know exactly where skill shortages are hurting performance. But in complex organizations, like advanced manufacturing plants, hospitals, and energy suppliers, it’s hard to pinpoint and prioritize which capabilities demand the most resources.
Diagnostic interviews with all levels of management, facilitated feedback and workshops using risk assessment tools, and evaluation of different solution offerings can all be part of consulting projects designed to get real traction improving knowledge transfer and developing tomorrow’s workforce.
Learn faster in one-on-one sessions that help you create high value solutions to specific problems.
Our deep knowledge of workforce and leadership development issues and answers, combined with skillful counseling practices, make Dave an ideal coach for many leaders grappling with unique talent and knowledge management problems.
Sometimes coaching is a logical follow up program for workshops or an effective part of a consulting engagement. Interactions can be over coffee, via Skype, phone or email. Whatever best supports performance improvement and the outcomes you want.
Passionately Pursuing Solutions for a Changing Workforce
About David
Author, speaker and consultant Dr. David DeLong helps organizations find and implement practical solutions for critical skill shortages and faster knowledge transfer. President of the research-driven consulting firm Smart Workforce Strategies, he is also a research fellow at the MIT AgeLab and has been an adjunct professor at Babson College where he taught “Leading & Managing Change” & “Designing & Managing E-Business Organizations.”