Retailers should hire more staff with extensive digital expertise, UKCES suggests

The UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) has urged retailers to hire digitally-skilled staff in order to tackle a forthcoming productivity fall, a recent news report has been able to reveal.

The organization’s report suggests that as retail becomes increasingly digitalised, a completely different workforce expertise is required to keep pace with this trend.

It also revealed that employers in retail are failing to attract more employees with high-tech skills because they don’t see the sector as a good career prospect.

UKCES said employers were also finding it difficult to recruit people with customer service skills and that existing staff also needed more training. In the 2013 UKCES Employer Skills Survey, 55 per cent of retailers with skills gaps identified customer service abilities as a challenge, compared to 47 per cent across all industries.

As well as attracting more candidates with desirable skill sets, the report urged employers to develop existing workers. The 2013 Employer Skills Survey found that 61 per cent of retailers provided their staff with some form of training, which is slightly below the UK average of 66 per cent of employers.

“The wholesale and retail sector is the largest sector in the UK economy by employment, but sector productivity is relatively low,” said Dr Vicki Belt, assistant director at UKCES. “There is scope to improve productivity by making full use of existing talent and ensuring that workers have the opportunity to build their skills and experience, and progress within the sector.”

Time and Attendance Systems enable better skills management and performance monitoring

Beside checking attendance and worked times, the Tensor WinTA Time and Attendance suite also includes a dedicated HR module. Tensor Personnel allows you to record a vast amount of personal information about your company staff, including here basic details, course attendance, educational history, language skills, professional institute memberships, skills, etc.

Moreover, WinTA.NET supplies the relevant managers with information on employee’s absences through warning email notifications or via hardcopy reports. After that, the intelligent employee management system would rapidly identify missing employees that are expected to be at work and then informs you via automatic email reporting reports distributed by email.

Tensor’s range of products offer both a high level of reliability and good value for money, which means that companies who do decide to implement our solutions will immediately see the returns, without taking a hit as far as their balances are concerned.

If you’d like to find out more about the range of workforce management and Time and Attendance solutions supplied by Tensor, just contact us or Book a Demo, our representatives will be more than happy to answer any questions or queries you might have.