Introduction
According to the World Economic Forum’s research, it has been predicted that 85 million jobs may experience a tectonic shift in terms of the allocation of functions between man and machine by 2025. Moreover, 97 million new roles will likely be created that would pivot around the division of labor between man, machine, and algorithm.
No matter how many times you come across such data, it underpins the need for reskilling and upskilling to keep jobs from being redundant and prepare employees for future roles.
What is upskilling?
Developing new skills for employees to use at work is known as upskilling. The necessity for upskilling has accelerated due to technology. There is a pressing need to give your personnel ongoing training and development.
New abilities are needed as technology advances, and employment requirements shift. This talent gap is filled through upskilling through continual training. Upskilling your workforce keeps your staff abreast of current business best practices and keeps your organization competitive.
When an employee upskills, they acquire new abilities to make themselves more capable of performing their work. For instance, to keep up with developments in the marketing sector, an experienced marketing executive in a company might need to master digital marketing abilities. In this situation, the person already possesses a solid foundation and fundamental knowledge and only needs to pick up a few new abilities to perform his or her work more effectively. In other words, upskilling aids in bridging the company’s skills gap.
Employees who upskill typically only see an improvement in their present role-specific performance. The role or career path remains unchanged. Training courses, mentoring, micro-learning, etc. may be used in upskilling. Companies can increase the skills of their current employees without spending money or time on recruiting new ones by upskilling them.
Examples of upskilling
Upskilling keeps your personnel current, but you must be strategic to keep it from using excessive amounts of resources. These are your alternatives for upskilling:
Numerous Free Online Courses (MOOCs)
You may access thousands of courses to upskill your staff through MOOCs offered by companies like Coursera, Udemy, Envato Tuts+, or LinkedIn Learning. You can either choose to spend money on an inexpensive membership model or access some of these for free.
Create a list of courses that might help employees in particular roles to get the most out of these platforms. Managers should receive training on their alternatives so they can help guide employee upskilling.
Formal education
Long-term skill upskilling is supported via degree programs and certifications. They offer a strong base from which workers can continue to rise.
There are ways to reduce the costs of traditional education, even though it can be costly. As an illustration, take into account collaborating with your neighborhood community college or institution to investigate your options for workforce education. Investigate regional grants or other government financing options for ongoing education.
Personal Training
Investment in customized training, which can be provided life or on-demand via a learning management system, may make sense if you work in a specialized field (LMS).
Your LMS should ideally support mobile-first delivery and microlearning. As workers “unlock” new skills, it should be set up to prompt them to upgrade their skills. Employees are more inclined to use the program if access to learning is made simple.
Internal Training and Mentoring
A resource-friendly method of honing abilities is to create internal mentorship programs. For instance, a worker in a higher position can mentor their successor and pass along the knowledge and abilities they’ve acquired over time. Mentorship initiatives spread institutional knowledge and foster employee trust.
Building a resilient workforce is facilitated by internal training programs that focus on soft skills like emotional intelligence, agility, flexibility, or curiosity. Compared to practical talents, these ideas are less concrete and far more challenging to teach. Soft skills can be taught as concepts with the help of a strong conceptual framework, after which employees can put them into practice on the job. Learning while working doesn’t incur additional costs and has a higher learning impact than using only online learning courses.
A strong workforce strategy must include upskilling. While your competitors are scurrying to locate new hires, your organization can establish a staff that is ready to absorb and take advantage of the change by implementing an internal upskilling strategy.
By adopting upskilling, you may assist your employees in maintaining competence and assurance in their area of specialization—despite changes and advancements in that area.
What is reskilling?
Learning new abilities so that you can perform a different profession is referred to as reskilling. Retraining an employee to acquire new skills is another way to do it in a professional setting. When an employee’s skill set or the role he or she holds becomes obsolete but the employer is still interested in keeping that employee, they may demonstrate an interest in reskilling that individual. In such circumstances, they might transfer that individual to a completely different department, where they would require a different set of skills. Of course, the individual will need to pick up new abilities to succeed in this new position.
For instance, a company might no longer require an office clerk, but that individual will still be a valued asset due to his or her experience and knowledge of the company, and as that employee acquires a new skill set, they can be moved to an in-demand position.
Examples of reskilling
Developing new skills or competencies is referred to as reskilling. These skills typically enable corporate learners to take on additional duties or job responsibilities to advance their careers. To pursue new interests or hobbies, they might also re-skill in their personal lives.
Retraining oneself can be difficult because it requires adaptability and flexibility. Fortunately, 7 best practices can assist you in facilitating the procedure so that your business learners can acquire fresh talents.
1. Assess “Pain Points” in e-learning
To do this, carefully assess the weaknesses in your organization’s present eLearning approach. Your success may occasionally be hampered if your corporate eLearning courses don’t include certain skill sets. For instance, to increase your revenues, your corporate learners might need to develop their selling abilities. However, there are neither corporate eLearning activities nor online tests for this crucial skill in your corporate eLearning program. You might include additional skills or attributes in your corporate eLearning strategy for reskilling if you find that some are missing.
2. Identify Performance And Skill Gaps
Your corporate learners could have personal pain points in the form of performance gaps in addition to eLearning pain points. To find out what they already know and what they need to know to accomplish their goals, do pre-assessments and surveys. This could entail both picking up new abilities and brushing up on old ones that have gotten rusty over time. For instance, a business learner took part in online training for customer service many years ago. After finishing, they agreed to take a new job in a different division. They never used those abilities in the actual world as a result. They can retrain in customer service skills now to perform their existing job obligations thanks to reskilling.
3. Examine the strengths of corporate learners
Many corporate learners aren’t even aware of the skill sets or unique abilities they have. But when it comes time to reskill, these distinctive characteristics give individuals an advantage. For instance, a person with experience in creative writing can use this talent to develop their lateral thinking abilities. It’s all about thinking creatively and repurposing current skills. Those skills that share a trait may be retrained more successfully. Keep in mind that weaknesses could potentially be concealed. A corporate learner is looking to develop a certain ability. But do they first need to focus on other requirements?
4. Make Use Of Online Training Simulations And Branching Scenarios
Serious games, branching situations, and online training simulations are effective reskilling aids. They provide risk-free, real-world exposure, allowing business learners to develop critical skills more quickly. To increase immersion and authenticity, make use of genuine pictures, sounds, and circumstances. Keep in mind that the objective is to simulate real-world issues so that corporate learners can contextualize the material.
They can use their abilities to overcome challenges in both their personal and professional lives. Online training simulations can also point out learning strengths and places for development, as a side note. This is because they necessitate practical expertise. To get the desired result, people must put what they’ve learned into practice. By giving them a task that calls for a variety of processes or skills, for instance. If they are unable to finish the process, this may be an indication that they lack the required abilities.
5. Organize skill-focused webinars
Some abilities call for modeling and observation. Online presentations are effective, but they lack the interactivity of skill-focused webinars. Web conferencing tools are used to host these live virtual sessions where corporate learners can ask questions and exchange ideas. Create a broad framework before hosting your first webinar to guide the discussion.
To enhance the corporate eLearning experience, you should also include online training exercises, tests, and multimedia. Additionally, live events can be recorded so that asynchronous learners can “attend.” It also functions as a priceless online training support tool, allowing corporate trainees to brush up on their abilities whenever and whenever they choose.
6. Create A Mentorship Program For Reskilling
Consider skills to be a commodity. Some corporate learners have useful qualities that they can impart to their peers. Their peers provide experience and mutual skill development in return. . To determine their existing skills and those that they need to develop, survey corporate learners. Match mentors and mentees who have complementary skill sets using the data.
To make the corporate eLearning experience more fruitful, also look into their interests and personality attributes. Corporate learners, for instance, who share a pastime already have that in common. They can therefore use that as a launchpad. Finding the ideal online training environment for your mentorship programs, such as web conferencing software or project management tools, is also essential. This eliminates distance barriers and facilitates communication.
7. Make a plan.
The talents that corporations need today may be known to corporate learners, but what about tomorrow? A significant quantity of online training experience is necessary for some skills. In reality, developing more complicated or involved skills can take a long time. To establish a tailored skill development plan for the future, it is crucial to undertake an effective skills assessment for your corporate audience.
Create a thorough overview of the abilities they require, the corporate eLearning courses they ought to enroll in, and the online tools that are accessible. Additionally, a timeline highlighting each phase of the procedure should be in place. Before putting together a reskilling plan, take into account meeting with management and performing workplace observations.
Retraining is frequently required in the corporate sector. To increase productivity, workers must pick up new skills or update rusty ones.
Differences between upskilling and reskilling
The terms “reskilling” and “upskilling” are frequently used in boardrooms across the nation. Why has this kind of training and development suddenly become so important?
Due to huge changes in our technical and economic environments that have left many employees unemployed and many companies plagued with skills gaps, interest in reskilling and upskilling has increased over the past several years. Only made worse by COVID-19, these issues.
Organizations have been devastated by the pandemic’s economic effects, but it is also evident from how quickly our work environment changed that if your team isn’t flexible and adaptable, your business will struggle.
In the current economic environment, businesses cannot rely on customer and market expectations to remain constant. In the current economic environment, businesses cannot rely on customer and market expectations to remain constant. You will need a workforce that is resilient, agile, and adaptable given the instability and unpredictability in the world. In other words, you must be ready to retrain or upskill your employees. If you don’t, your company will find it difficult to stay up with the culture of perpetual change and progress that exists today.
Both upskilling and down killing have advantages and perfect applications. When is it best to try reskilling and when is it better to employ upskilling? The answer to that question is based on the objectives of your business.
Examine your five-year plan, and as we discuss the distinctions between these two staff development models, you will be able to decide which approach is most appropriate.
1. Reskilling emphasizes preparing workers for new positions
First, let’s define reskilling. When your employees acquire the new abilities required to perform a new job function for your company, this is known as reskilling. In contrast to a mid-career crisis, your employee’s new position will be similar to their old one, but they will need additional training and new skills to be successful in it.
Examining employees whose existing skill set overlaps with those required for the new position is the key to selecting candidates for reskilling. For instance, you might decide to retrain a data entry specialist with excellent technical abilities for a position as a data analyst.
To embark on this new function, the data entry professional will need to master reporting software or SQL. But their expertise with the organization and preservation of databases acquired from their work as data entry specialists will help them grasp these new abilities.
2. Upskilling is concerned with acquiring new abilities for the same position
Employees who want to upskill must acquire new knowledge and abilities. However, you are not preparing an employee for a new role when you upskill them. Simply said, upskilling is giving employees the skills and information they need to carry out their current tasks more successfully, effectively, or in a more contemporary manner.
To enhance job performance or fill skill gaps you notice appearing on your team, use upskilling. Think about a Microsoft Access expert who specializes in reporting. That reporting specialist would need to upgrade their skills if your company decided to use Tableau or another data visualization program to succeed in their position.
Their employment title or role would remain the same after this upskilling. Simply put, it would provide them with the resources they need to do their reporting tasks in Tableau rather than Microsoft Access.
3. When to use reskilling
Which circumstances are the best ones to apply reskilling in? Retaining dependable, high-performing workers whose roles have become obsolete is one of the most frequent uses for reskilling.
Maybe a department was eliminated from your company, or perhaps a crucial piece of software was retired. In any case, you’ll be left with a group of workers whose primary duties for your company are no longer required. You must use reskilling to take on a different function if you want to keep these individuals.
Alternatively, your company can use a business plan that involves moving employees between departments. For instance, if you want to increase sales, you might have to relocate certain customer support experts into sales support positions. You will need to reskill that personnel for the job change if you want to keep them on instead of laying them off and hiring new sales support staff.
4. When to use upskilling
When might upskilling be used? It’s not necessary to teach staff members a new job to upskill them. It aims to enable people to prosper in their existing position. Since job responsibilities change over time, neither can our employees’ skill sets.
To help your workers adapt to new changes in your industry, upskilling is typically used. For instance, implementing new technology is a typical justification for upskilling your team. Despite having thirty years of experience, your VP of marketing may not be able to effectively administer the new CRM platform you’ve just introduced.
By adopting upskilling, you may assist your employees in maintaining competence and assurance in their area of specialization—despite changes and advancements in that area.