Most companies don’t have a talent shortage, they have a visibility problem. Across every team, there are people with skills that never show up in job titles, org charts, or HR systems. This can happen throughout a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's because we encountered a problem in our job or home that we wanted to find a fix and accidentally learned a new skill (Scripting in Excel, anyone?).

Equally frequent is the case where we just switched jobs or full-on careers along the way. Even yours truly is a tester that became a developer, only to switch towards analysis and suddenly be working with people way more through the title of Scrum Master and later team coach, all while desiging board games along the way.

Now let's say I start a job somewhere as team lead, how will my team or other teams in my company ever know I can help them out on various other tasks if the need is ever high? I have these skills, but because they are informal, scattered, or undocumented, they often stay hidden until someone leaves, a project stalls, or a role suddenly becomes hard to fill. That’s a missed opportunity. When companies can see the skills they already have, they can make better decisions: who to develop, who to involve, where gaps are real, and where talent is simply being overlooked.

Besides helping the company to close gaps and be ready for abrupt changes, it also gives employees a clearer view of where they can grow, instead of leaving career development to guesswork or annual review cycles. The ability we've built into Brigid to manually add your own skills on top of the needed skills for your jobs, allows you to see how you line up to other jobs in your company while making yourself visible to others.

This way you can add direction, visibility and purpose to the titles, skills and people in your company. Not only do you allow people to reuse skills they've built in the past, but you also allow people to stay proud of the journey they've been through until this point. And who knows, maybe the trip through the topology that is your company might suddenly allow for a few switches nobody ever thought of.

The future of workforce planning starts with a simple shift: Before asking “Who do we need to hire?”, ask “What skills are already here?”