What does a vacant position cost? Around $14,000 over just three months. And that's excluding the lost corporate training costs when the previous employee moved over to the competitor.

But organizations don't choose to hold vacant positions. It's usually not a "strategic" choice. Rather, the necessary skills are simply unavailable. And these skills are unavailable because either there are only a few people in the market who possess them, or these skills are so new that nobody has acquired them yet.

With today's global skills gap and rapid technological advancement, the demand for new knowledge, new capabilities, and new thinking is infinitely greater than the supply.

So what do you do when the skills you need can't be recruited? The obvious answer might be to develop your current employees through training.