Reskilling and Upskilling: Our vision for 2025
As job markets and workforce demand change, organizations need to rethink about how to stay competitive.
Reskilling and Upskilling
Our Vision for 2025
As job markets and workforce demand change, organizations need to rethink about how to stay competitive.
2022 caused a huge amount of change for organizations worldwide, with flow-on-effects in terms of the skills companies need to continue to be successful. The technological advances, new ways of working, and new expectations from business leaders and employees, have all created a situation where new learning is no longer a ‘nice-to-have'—it’s vital.
By 2025, a survey by the World Economic Forum predicts that machines are set to draw level with humans in terms of tasks commonly performed in the workplace.
Companies questioned in the survey expected machines to take ground away from humans in the share of task hours across every discipline, from information and data processing, to administering, performing physical and manual work activities, and reasoning and decision-making.
The logical result of this finding is that more jobs will inevitably be replaced, with many of today’s professionals needing to develop new skills to stay competitive in the talent market.
But the greater question is how deep the implications are for organizations who, in many cases, have already started realizing that they lack access to the key skills needed to move their businesses forward. Or for those who’ve started questioning how to accompany vast numbers of employees on their upskilling and reskilling journeys.
Companies need to reinvent and adapt both their upskilling and reskilling processes to the new world of work. From preparing for the automation of roles to helping employees choose which skills they want to develop, organizations with a solid strategy will set themselves apart for future success.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of identifying, measuring, and developing the skills of your employees. Help them thrive in their careers, so you can take your business forward.
The reality of skills in today’s organizations
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Defining upskilling and reskilling as they apply in today’s workplace
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How to identify skills gaps in your organization
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How to validate skills and measure skill level
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The reality of skills in today's organizations
Facing skill shortages and their causes
According to a recent Gartner report, in 2022, 84% of HR leaders said it is important to equip managers with new skills.
It’s against this backdrop that organizations have previously had a tendency to look externally for the talent they needed, instead of turning first to internal mobility efforts and investing in the learning required to help their people acquire new skills. Large-scale learning programs have often not dove-tailed with internal mobility efforts, and the ‘quick fix’ of hiring the skills needs externally has tended to be favored.
With all the changes, companies world-wide implemented hiring freezes. HR and L&D managers are now coming back to placing the development of critical skills at the top of their focus list to make the most of the talent available internally, foster new engagement and retention, and help transform their operations.
How did we get here?
The driving forces
These past two years impacted the skills' agenda for a whopping 97% of organizations.
It made HR and business leaders aware of their organization’s skill gaps and highlighted the importance of developing new critical skills in the long term. Additionally, it accelerated efforts towards improving the skills agenda and placed more attention on talent mobility.
However, organizations were facing skills shortages and learning inefficiencies well before that.
Has your approach to skills development changed ?
- No, we had already adapted our skills agendac.
- No, we’re still waiting to make changes to our skills development plan.
- Yes, we harnessed the new challenges to fuel the changes we had already planned.
- Yes, we had to react and find new ways to thrive.
What 2021 and 2022 did was act as a catalyst to accelerate 3 core drivers behind skills development:
Defining upskilling and reskilling as they apply in today’s workplace
Understanding how these two processes can drive organizational growth
Upskilling refers to teaching employees new skills they can add on top of their current abilities.
This process is mandatory for professionals who want to advance in their roles and stay up to date with the changing industry trends. Upskilling should always be a part of your company’s L&D strategy as it helps you maintain a talented workforce and stay ahead of your competitors.
Reskilling is the process through which an individual learns or renews skills that will help them change their careers, or even switch industries altogether.
Most often, when individuals opt for reskilling they’re looking for similar skills to the ones they have, or have a clear outline of what their company needs. Organizations focusing on reskilling keep their existing employees, but move them towards a different position or department.
More companies have started to realize the importance of these two processes as effective methods for preventing a severe skills' shortage. Before 2022, individuals were tempted to maintain a set list of skills and simply work hard, so their companies can thrive. In reality, this approach proved itself as inefficient, as employees who couldn’t adapt to new demands were furloughed or laid off.
How to identify skills gaps in your organization
Taking a deep dive into the methods for identifying current talent gaps
65% of companies acknowledge they have significant skills gaps they need to cover. Their biggest concern is that they don’t know how to tackle this problem.
We believe the best approach is to start by conducting a skills gap analysis.
Look at every team as a whole and analyze every individual’s skill profile. You’ll want to measure these accurately, so you’re not assuming a person has fully grasped a skill. Missing or incomplete knowledge and expertise with a skill is a clear sign you need to implement targeted upskilling practices.
Next, list your company’s goals. What do you want to achieve? Will the current skills of your teams be enough? What skills could be developed as a major focus in the near future? When writing down your skills needs to be related to company goals, make sure you benchmark these against emerging skills.
- Use tools like skills graphs to map out your organization’s skills, see where each employee is positioned, and spot missing skills. Cegid Talentsoft Analytics helps you get to know your employees’ skills, experiences, and career drivers.
- Our Cegid Talent Profile consolidates all employee information from past jobs and training experiences, with acquired skills and aspirations. It works as a hub for matching employees with new opportunities, enabling team members to declare and contextualize skills.
Once you have a clear understanding of where your organization stands, you can take action to close gaps and address other issues such as measuring and validating skills. These skills graphs will determine what training opportunities you’ll need to create, as well as how to establish new criteria for your hiring process to help you fill the gaps.
The top 4 skill sets to prioritize
Base your skills' agenda on key skills needs to future-proof your organization
40% of global companies surveyed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) are planning on accelerating their upskilling/reskilling programs, while 70% want to speed up the digitalization of L&D processes.
After you’ve taken stock of your organization’s skills, go over these top four skill sets we see as crucial to prepare for the future. While every organization and industry is different, these skill sets describe common focus areas:
Critical thinking and problem-solving
The WEF regularly includes these skills at the top of their list of skills to develop across industries and job categories. As automation becomes more ubiquitous, the human added-value of being able to think critically and solve complex problems is only likely to grow in importance.
Self-management skills
Resilience, self-motivation, and stress resistance are just three of the self-management skills in high demand right now. Above all, active learning stands out as a skill many individuals are already focusing on developing. Coursera has reported a 4x increase in the number of people seeking out their own self-learning opportunities online.
Business skills
While these skills are varied, the WEF notes project management, customer management, and general business skills as the new basics every employee should have, regardless of their role.
Tech skills
The demand for AI skills is taking over all occupations. Data science, machine learning, and deep learning are becoming a part of the tech stack for all kinds of roles, from big data architects to digital marketing managers and sales professionals.
Don’t ignore soft skills in your training programs. These are often even more important than tech skills, since they are human traits technology will never be able to replace.
2020 revealed that many skilled blue-collar jobs will survive automation as the demand for their work increases. A Cognizant report highlights how skilled job roles will grow by 3% across all industries in the next five years. In particular, blue-collar workers could benefit from learning tech skills like robotics, as well as soft skills around innovation and creativity.
HR’s role in ensuring upskilling
HR has a big role to play in helping individuals and teams throughout the organization to upskill and reskill. But what new skills should HR professionals be focusing on?
As we approach 2025, HR representatives should focus more on developing a broad number of core capabilities.
Erik van Vulpen, CEO of the Academy to Innovate HR, has identified four central skills that HR managers need to develop into 2025 in order to future-proof their organizations:
Becoming people advocates: They need to understand how to build culture, communicate better, and become trusted advisors.
Building business acumen: Get a deep understanding of the business as a whole, its strategy and key metrics, and where people come in.
Being data-driven: This implies being able to make better decisions backed by data and using analytics as a central dashboard.
In particular, HR managers should start by building their data skills. Rebecca Wettemann, Principal at Valoir, also provided us with her best tips on making use of data visualization tools and choosing the best software for your needs:
Getting a sense of what’s out there in the world of data visualization can be a real eye-opener. Also, take a look at the many data tools out there to experiment with, without making an initial investment. Finally, think differently about the data you have. It’s really about looking forward, as HR is making this important mind shift from past to future.
Rebecca Wetteman, Principal at Valoir
Data can also help create an environment where people are able to free up time to upskill and/or reskill. Reality has shown that often budgets or available learning systems aren't as big of an issue as is the lack of time that employees are dealing with. HR should further lead this effort and create a framework that involves managers and employees.
With this in mind, Cegid's Training Match tool allows HR and L&D managers to automatically suggest or register employees for relevant trainings and certifications based on a predefined set of criteria.
How to measure and validate skill level
Once you’ve identified the skills you need to improve, it’s time to understand where your workforce stands
The level of skill an individual has matters. While two employees may have taken time to learn a particular skill, getting a sense of the depth of their knowledge and expertise is crucial. This measure can guide your upskilling efforts and enable you to make decisions as you accompany current employees throughout their learning journey.
As for reskilling, measurement shouldn’t be ignored either, as it can help you spot if a person is unable to move beyond their current skill set and might have to consider switching directions.
To measure your team members’ skill level, analyze the following three key expertise indicators:
- Certification: Certified courses prove a person’s competencies and show the exact level at which someone has mastered both the theoretical and practical basics required for a certain role, task, or job.
- Qualifications: Formal education like a bachelor’s or master’s degree also demonstrates a degree of acquired knowledge in a certain subject area.
- Experience: The best way of understanding where an employee stands is to look at their previous jobs. Specifically, you’re interested in how long and to what extent a person has worked with a tool or technology and what soft skills they had the chance to apply.
HR managers should start using data more for training. We should be looking at what employees are learning, volunteering and mentoring opportunities, and other reskilling and development sources outside of the LMS bubble […] to understand not just the current talent profile, but also what their career trajectory is and how we can help them get there.
Rebecca Wetteman, Principal at Valoir
Once you get a clear idea of what skills your team members have, you need to confirm whether they’re moving in the right direction. Validation of learning outcomes of both formal and informal learning remains a challenge.
New trends in terms of education and individual learning are speeding up the skills acquisition and validation process. With free online learning and certified courses, employees can complete a training session and acquire new skills. Tests can also be used to regularly check on knowledge and see if your team is up-to-date with the latest changes in their industry.
But an online exam whose answers are often leaked won’t ensure they’re keeping that information. So how do make sure they’ve really acquired that skill?
By creating more opportunities for them to apply their newly acquired skills.
If, together with them, you’ve selected the right skills to work on, this should be easy. The safest approach is to know what projects an employee will work on and recommend courses and certifications based on skills they’ll need regularly.
Employee self-validation vs. manager validation
Allowing individuals to monitor their learning progress and validate their own skills is a great way of keeping them accountable and confident. However, as managers, it’s important for you to check in with your team members at the end of a learning experience.
Discuss what they’ve learned, “test” out their new competencies, and validate the acquired new skills for yourself.
Where do you think your people turn to the most for learning
- Online learning platforms (e.g. LinkedIn Learning)
- Your organization’s learning management system (LMS)
- In-person training
- Peer-to-peer learning
- People need a place to show off their skills. That’s where the Cegid Talentsoft Talent Profile comes in to help employees showcase their expertise and training experience. Managers will then be able to analyze these profiles and match their talent to new projects based on skill requirements.
- Create learning pathways to validate skills. Through the Cegid Talentsoft LMS, employees can access recommended content along with virtual classes. They can also keep track of their results and interact with trainers, so they can improve their learning process based on regular feedback.
- Measure skills by evaluating employee performance. Cegid Talentsoft Performance gives you a holistic overview of individuals’ performance, needs, and skills. Managers can visually analyze mobility areas and skill gaps to help their teams evolve their careers and positively impact organizational results.
What learning agility looks like
Do more than just survive: fine-tune your L&D processes as you face unexpected skill demands
Learning agility implies adapting learning methods and habits in times of uncertainty.
Simply put, an agile learner will have no problems or fears when acquiring new skills through unfamiliar methods or when faced with a pressing deadline. As a best practice, short and relevant educational content works best for helping employees stay in the loop as they work.
Learning agility shouldn't be confused with agile learning. The latter refers to applying common Agile principles like breaking down the learning process into sprints or moving training faster.
Learning agility goes hand in hand with “just-in-time” learning. Individuals or companies can use this approach to prepare their training materials for when a new need arises. Having the resources at hand on time makes for immediate and automatic learning. Employees can learn at their own pace and no longer need to wait for development interviews and manager validation. On-demand courses can be taken at any point when they need that information, so they won’t have to wait months for the course to start.
To implement just-in-time learning properly, look beyond general skills. Up-to-date product information and company policy changes along with skill-related courses should all be part of your L&D company database.
By 2025, both learning approaches should become second nature within your organization. This will give both employees and your company the chance to use custom development pathways to grow.
Ensuring these are regularly updated according to industry standards and upcoming talent demands will make the success of your team members an easy feat. All they have to do is log into your platform and access the course they need, just in time for them to acquire the knowledge and skills they need for a project.
Organizations need to take both employee interests and skills into account when preparing their upskilling and reskilling programs. There’s no point in having team members who are overly skilled (or spread their expertise across a wide variety of skills) in areas that aren’t of interest to them. This will only result in your employees being less engaged, staying unhappy at work, and not reaching their peak productivity.
Companies can keep employees engaged by teaching skills for the jobs they want, as opposed to forcing new projects or tasks for the role they currently have.
From an employee’s interest, this ensures they’ll move forward in their careers through internal mobility and learn new skills that help them keep up with industry demands. When it comes to the employer’s side, allowing individuals to choose what skills they want to work on helps your organization prepare for future market requirements.
Employees might not know where to start with their training without guidance from their employer. Do your research to spot up-and-coming skill trends and show employees how a specific new skill will help them in their careers. Employees will then make the learning decisions on their own based on their personal goals, while you’ll still be able to maintain a workforce that’s ready to face new challenges.
By 2025, you should focus on building equal reskilling and upskilling programs for your current workforce as well as for your future employees and the older generation who’s at risk of never finding a job again. PwC has already set up their own New world. New skills. plan to teach other businesses upskilling best practices. In the meantime, Amazon is running a large-scale project to invest $700 million in training programs for 100,000 of their employees.
Be wary that upskilling and reskilling isn’t a “set and forget” scheme. People and organizations evolve, so skills and learning materials should always be revised and refreshed.
Simply importing skills and matching them to employees doesn’t display a person’s evolution or newly-gained attributes. The people responsible for skills administration (e.g. HR and L&D managers) need to constantly monitor and update the skills graph as employees learn new skills that weren’t in the system before.
In the upcoming years, HR leaders should strive to use upskilling and reskilling practices to adapt to changes around their workforce. This way, when employees leave or switch careers, your company won’t be left without a skill. The key is to ensure you’ve always got the right measures in place to maintain highly-trained individuals or quickly put out resources that cover in-demand skills.
Among all capabilities, resilience remains the key quality that can help employees face new challenges and continue developing their careers.
Organizations need the same kind of adaptability when putting together their reskilling and upskilling plans, so they can shift gears as needed, adjust their learning resources as they go, and manage uncertainty.
Future-proof your organization with Cegid Talentsoft Content
- Content as a Service: Learning managers can reach all external training content needs through this digital platform with exclusive training content offered by our partners.
- Custom training content: Managers can use content recommendations to suggest customized training courses for every individual’s needs. This supports your blended learning programs through a mix of off-the-shelf content and face-to-face training, online classes, and additional personalized learning materials.
- Bespoke production management: Use the Cegid Talentsoft Content platform to share project specifications and receive a custom proposal from expert agencies and instructional designers so you can create your own training courses.
