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.
