Bridging the U.S. Workforce Skills Gap: A Unified Effort - Sunil Ramlall, Ph.D.

Bridging the U.S. Workforce Skills Gap: A Unified Effort - Sunil Ramlall, Ph.D. 

The U.S. workforce faces one of the most pressing challenges of our time: a widening skills gap that threatens both economic growth and organizational performance. My recent article, Collaborative Strategies for Bridging the U.S. Workforce Skills Gap, published in the International Journal of Learning & Development, explores how this gap impacts employers, employees, and the nation—and what can be done about it.

The Challenge

Despite rapid technological change and evolving business needs, many organizations struggle to find workers with the right mix of technical expertise and human skills. Employers cite shortages in areas like data analytics, healthcare, and manufacturing, while employees often lack access to upskilling and reskilling opportunities that could prepare them for these roles.

A Collaborative Solution

No single entity can close the gap alone. The article emphasizes the need for a coordinated approach across four key stakeholders:

• Organizations: Implementing continuous training, reskilling, and career development initiatives.

• SHRM & Professional Associations: Setting standards and driving adoption of best practices in HR and workforce development.

• Academic Institutions: Aligning curricula with real-world business needs, ensuring graduates are workforce-ready.

• Government: Supporting public-private partnerships, funding workforce initiatives, and reducing barriers to education and training.

Moving Forward

Closing the skills gap requires more than incremental change. It demands bold, integrated strategies that combine business acumen, HR innovation, and policy support. By working together, organizations and institutions can create a workforce that is adaptable, future-ready, and globally competitive.

The message is clear: bridging the skills gap is not just a challenge—it’s an opportunity to strengthen our workforce, our economy, and our communities.

Full Citation:
Ramlall, S., & Ramlall, A. (2025). Collaborative Strategies for Bridging the U.S. Workforce Skills Gap: A Necessary Unified Effort by Organizations, SHRM, Academic Institutions, and Government. International Journal of Learning & Development, 15(2). https://doi.org/10.5296/ijld.v15i2.22678

Evolution of Management Thinking by Sunil Ramlall, Ph.D.

Dr. Sunil Ramlall shares an overview of the evolution of management thinking with a brief overview of management philosophies over time. This is especially relevant as we study management and strive to be the most effective managers and leaders.

Management Consulting Services - Employee Engagement, Motivation, and Pe...

𝗔𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗶𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲𝘀.

Are your organizational strategies focused on employee engagement, motivation, employee retention, and improving performance? As experts in the field, we will partner with you to conduct in-depth needs analysis, identify relevant strategies, and help with implementation to improve these key organizational outcomes.

We also focus on how work can create joy and happiness especially through positive organizational practices. Bottomline, we will collaborate on integrating organizational practices that will retain your key talent, enhance employees' engagement levels, and ultimately performance at the individual, team, and organizational levels. We will also conduct rigorous statistical analysis to understand the relationships and your current practices and the deliverables.

sramlall001@gmail.com | 651-210-2761

Sunil Ramlall on the Pursuit of Happiness

Happiness - Brief Description by Sunil Ramlall

The earliest writings of philosophers pondered the virtues of positive thinking and the pursuit of happiness. For example, Aristotle argued that happiness is the highest good humans can achieve and that the use of reason and rationality is essential to its achievement.

In today's society, many will argue that work is the source of their stress, their inability to spend adequate time with family or volunteer in community activities and being unable to further their education. Happiness can be cultivated by identifying and using the strengths people already possess.

The search for excellence and all‐around happiness has been the important objective for ages. Happiness can be attained either through self‐contentment or through fulfillment of desires.

Over the years, many organizational leaders and managers have argued about the relationship between happy/satisfied employees and productive employees.

Pursuing that inner sense of freedom, security, and reassurance are core to creating psychological well-being. Asking the “why” for all we do. Why are we working? Why pursue financial freedom? Why a better health? This helps to create a sense of purpose for all we do. We are choosing to stay with a job maybe because it gives us meaning, or maybe we need to seek alternative options because it does not contribute to our happiness adequately. The positive psychology scholarship clearly defines the rationale for positive thinking.

Sunil Ramlall, Ph.D. 

Handbook of Research on Future of Work and Education: Implications for Curriculum Delivery and Work Design

Handbook of Research on Future of Work and Education: Implications for Curriculum Delivery and Work Design

Sunil Ramlall - Author

An Overview of HR by Sunil Ramlall, Ph D

An Overview of HR by Sunil Ramlall, Ph D

An Overview of Team Dynamics Sunil Ramlall, Ph D

SWOT Analysis Overview by Sunil Ramlall, Ph D

Management Topics

Sunil Ramlall Partners with WalletHub on Happiest States in America

 The personal finance website Wallet Hub compared the 50 states across 30 key indicators of happiness, including rates of depression, income growth and the employment rate, to determine which state is the happiest.

The earliest writings of philosophers pondered the virtues of positive thinking and the pursuit of happiness. For example, Aristotle argued that happiness is the highest good humans can achieve and that the use of reason and rationality is essential to its achievement.

In today's society, many will argue that work is the source of their stress, their inability to spend adequate time with family or volunteer in community activities and being unable to further their education. Happiness can be cultivated by identifying and using the strengths people already possess.

The search for excellence and all‐around happiness has been the important objective for ages. Happiness can be attained either through self‐contentment or through fulfillment of desires.

Over the years, many organizational leaders and managers have argued about the relationship between happy/satisfied employees and productive employees.

Pursuing that inner sense of freedom, security, and reassurance are core to creating psychological well-being. Asking the “why” for all we do. Why are we working? Why pursue financial freedom? Why a better health? This helps to create a sense of purpose for all we do. We are choosing to stay with a job maybe because it gives us meaning, or maybe we need to seek alternative options because it does not contribute to our happiness adequately. The positive psychology scholarship clearly defines the rationale for positive thinking.

wallethub.com/edu/happiest-states/6959

Sunil Ramlall

Sunil Ramlall

Sunil Ramlall - Professor of Business

 

The Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) is the highest accredited academic business degree at Concordia University designed to address the current challenges facing companies, leaders, and teams in today’s business environment. You will develop scholar-practitioner skills as you learn from industry experts skilled in blending applied learning with theory development. You'll leave the program equipped with the tools, experience, and knowledge to transform organizations and improve performance through grounded research methods.

Doctor of Business Administration (cuw.edu)

Sunil Ramlall - Online Learning Effectiveness

What are some practices that enable online learning effectiveness?

www.sunilramlall.com/sunil-ramlall---academic-publications.html


Sunil

How does HR create value in organizations? Here's a brief video on the role of HR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT3Q2JiaqHs

Sunil

Soft Skills

With employers increasingly demanding a greater range of softer skills such as effective communication, the paper is intended to identify current accounting students’ perspectives on soft skills, identify their self-assessed competence in the respective soft skills, and suggest ways in which accounting students can gain soft skills. We assessed students’ level of perception/knowledge of soft skills, its’ importance and their self-assessment of their level of possession of these skills. With a sample size of 313 participants, we found that there were fewer gaps in what students perceived as being important in the accounting profession and how prepared they are in fulfilling the expectations. In addition, we found that the universities were placing more emphasis on developing these soft skills that have shown to be beneficial in students’ careers.

Advances in Research
2(11): 645-654, 2014, Article no. AIR.2014.11.008
SCIENCEDOMAIN international
www.sciencedomain.org
The Value of Soft-Skills in the Accounting Profession: Perspectives of Current Accounting Students
Sunil Ramlall1* and Dhanmati Ramlall2*
1Strategic HRM Consulting, LLC, USA.
2Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, USA.

Full-text is available at www.sunilramlall.com

Positive Organizational Behavior In the Workplace

Positive psychological principles and subsequently positive organizational behavior (POB) have become increasingly prevalent in the workplace in recent years. We have witnessed many struggles in the global economy where organizations across the world have experienced layoffs, lower productivity, lower employee morale, and generally struggling to be competitive.

Given these negative environments, what can organizations do across the world to enhance the positive practices that will create benefits for all of the stakeholders through POB? We also identify gaps that exist in organizational practices and how positive organizational behavior can be integrated to build sustainable organizations.

Please visit www.sunilramlall.com for full text.

Sunil Ramlall, Ph.D.

Our Children

Happiness

Happiness

Sunil Ramlall

Finding happiness is almost the purpose of life according to the Dalai Lama. Whenever we find real happiness, we should always treasure it and the sources of the happiness.

Sunil Ramlall

Healthcare to the Poor

Providing Healthcare to the Poor: Utilizing Operations Research as a Means to Improving People’s Lives through Quality Healthcare

Advances in Research4(1): 53-58, 2015, Article no.AIR.2015.060

ISSN: 2348-0394

 

ABSTRACT

Countries across the world are constantly pursuing access to timely and appropriate primary healthcare for people living in, even those with universal healthcare systems. This paper addresses the need for transformation and a more integrative approach to delivering healthcare to the poor. We are proposing the use of multiple operations research theories and applications as a means to integrate into core healthcare processes enabling organizations to provide a more efficient and accessible healthcare system.

 

www.sunilramlall.com

www.strategichrmconsulting.com

 

 
 

HR Competencies - International

HR Competencies:  Understanding the Impact on HR and Organizational Performance in Saudi Arabia

With growing emphasis being placed on HR competencies as a means to increasing HR’s effectiveness in Saudi Arabia, this research study seeks to i) determine if competencies are predictive of success in the HR profession, ii) understand how competencies vary by type of position within HR (entry level, manager, director and executives), iii) determine if there is a relationship between specific competencies and particular responsibilities of HR professionals, and iv) determine the relationship among education, years of HR experience, competencies, and compensation.  Numerous areas are identified as gaps between competencies HR professionals should possess compared to current competencies necessary to function effectively as strategic business partners.