Employers need ‘change in mindsets’ to close skills gaps in 2026: expert

“A lot of firms, especially SMEs, tend to focus on short-term hiring problems rather than long-term workplace planning issues. They tend to over-emphasize on credentials, like educational credentials and work experience and so on, rather than skills needs.” 

These comments come from Tony Fang, professor of economics and transformation at Memorial University of Newfoundland, whose recent survey of 1,700 senior executives and business owners found that almost one-third of Atlantic Canadian firms reported hiring challenges in the previous six months. 

Fang urges Canadian employers to look beyond vacancy lists and résumés as they wrestle with persistent skills shortages; rather than treating every hiring challenge as a skills gap, he says organizations need clearer diagnostics, better data and more deliberate workforce planning. 

Charlene Currie, president of Ontario-based MOR Consulting Group, says a narrow focus on job postings and perceived gaps in individual candidates means employers risk missing deeper structural issues.  

“In many organizations, what gets labeled as a skills gap is a symptom rather than the root problem,” she says. 

“The failure is often diagnostic. Organizations lack a clear, holistic view of how business priorities, enterprise risk, and talent are meant to work together.”  

Skills gaps start with business risk, not vacancy lists 

Currie explains that employers should start with strategy and risk, not recruiting. In her view, organizations need clarity on what they are trying to achieve and where things are most likely to break down before they start assessing skills. 

“Organizations need to understand what the business is trying to achieve and where delivery risk sits, before assessing whether current talent is aligned,” she says, adding that for her, questions about capabilities only make sense once leaders have worked through how work is supposed to get done and where execution is currently vulnerable. 

That also means traditional HR artefacts such as job descriptions and vacancy reports can be misleading if they are treated as standalone measures of capability.  

“Skills gaps are best identified through business performance data, not job descriptions. Missed targets, delivery breakdowns, persistent overload in some teams, and underutilization in others reveal far more about capability gaps than vacancy lists ever will,” says Currie.  

She adds that “vacancies are a lagging indicator. By the time a role has been open for months, the cost is already showing up elsewhere.”  

Fang’s research also supports the idea that headline vacancies do not tell the whole story: among Atlantic firms that experienced hiring difficulties, the most cited reason was difficulty attracting candidates, and employers pointed to a lack of education, experience and skills among applicants. 

Fang acknowledges that many employers still rely heavily on conventional job profiles, but stresses that these often fail to keep pace with how work is changing. His research supports this, showing that that larger and older firms in particular report hiring difficulties. 

“There's a need to move away from the standard job descriptions and job specification model, and really focus on the skill maps of the organization,” he says. This must include both technical and softer skills, he adds – that, in his view, is especially important for skills that are “strategic to the firm performance.”  

Building skill maps, audits and labour market awareness

In his recent study, most businesses did not specify their future skill needs or desired training in response to a more digital work environment, reinforcing the scale of this planning gap. 

Fang says employers — and especially SMEs, which make up the bulk of Canada’s employer market — need a clearer picture of both present and future skills, but many lack the internal resources to do this well: “Many, most of them, don't even have HR departments.” 

For those employers, he sees basic tools like skill maps and simple, repeated audits as a starting point: “To fill the gap between the short-term skills shortages, labour shortages with … long-term future skill needs for their organization.”  

Currie’s perspective is that many organizations are not only short of data, but looking in the wrong place when they do try to measure skills.  

Rather than just reacting to whichever roles are the hardest to fill, Curries says effective employers “prioritize skills gaps based on business impact and focus on those that materially reduce operational, financial, or delivery risk.” 

Data, diagnostics and interpreting workforce signals 

For Fang, better skills planning starts with a frank assessment of what employers know and what they do not. He points to basic data metrics such as vacancies, turnover and retention as underused sources of insight. 

“You need to understand what you don't know, right? And sometimes it's just lack of data,” says Fang.  

However, it also goes beyond a lack of data. As Fang explains, even when organizations have this information, it often goes underanalysed; in his view, employers can use those measures to distinguish between internal and external causes of skill shortages.  

“People just look at the face value,” he says. “But they don't look at what is most important about interpretation of the data.” 

Fang also points to exit interviews as another diagnostic tool, particularly where roles have been reshaped over time, causing employees to be mismatched to jobs. With exit interviews, employers can see where failures to adjust skill expectations is the real cause for quitting.  

Currie approaches the same issue from a different angle, blaming poor organizational design for unsuccessful hiring.  

“What often appears to be a skills issue is actually an organizational design issue,” she says. 

“Poor role design, unclear expectations, and weak succession planning frequently drive misalignment … hiring without clarity on what ‘good’ looks like leads to inconsistent decisions and long-term capability impacts.”  

Training investments and gap between needs and practice 

When it comes to closing gaps, Fang says there are several ways employers can build capabilities beyond external hiring. On top of other formalized training programs, he points to internal microcredential training as an example of how to plug skills gaps without recruiting. 

At the same time, he sees a disconnect between the skills employers say they want and the training actually delivered.  

For Currie, the cost of misdiagnosing skills issues shows up across the business – a risk that organizations can’t afford to take.  

“Closing skills gaps requires disciplined diagnosis, alignment to business risk, and a willingness to rethink how talent is assessed, developed, and deployed,” she says.   

“With talent representing one of the most significant investments organizations make, hiring cannot be treated as trial and error.”