Three Ways to Jumpstart Upskilling and Reskilling Your Workforce

Organizations are waking up to the fact that investing in reskilling and upskilling to prepare employees for the future is ultimately good for their people and their business. Additionally, upskilling and reskilling can save a company more money than the initial investment involved in delivering it. It sounds like a big undertaking, but not if you view it as a continuous investment.

To simplify things and work towards a new vision, below are three ways to jumpstart approaching the challenge of upskilling and reskilling within your organization.

1. Invest in analytics and assessment

While many employees are spurred on by their ambitions—are they bringing that drive to work with them? As a business, having robust skills mapping and an individual assessment process in place allows you to set priorities and keep everything objective, ensuring that everyone in your organization feels seen and heard. It also shows you who is most adaptable—and therefore who is worth investing in. While the metrics by which people are assessed are likely to vary according to their role, it is essential that steps to progression are shared, and that everyone is held to the same standards—wherever their strengths may lie.

2. Implement new approaches to learning

Whether you’re teaching your team new skills or empowering them to enhance the skills they already have, it’s worth breaking the steps down into bite-size chunks on-demand, ensuring employees don’t get too overwhelmed. You could enlist the support of external coaches when onboarding new hires, develop training in-house, and leverage mobile and remote learning platforms.

3. Make feedback transparent

This is something that managers should always be working on, endeavoring to offer constructive feedback in the moment and making the route to success crystal clear. When taking a new employee into the organization, giving them a coach as an incentive is a great way of showing them that the company is invested in their career.

While it’s crucial that things are kept equitable, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the upskilling and feedback process. Best practice for career development varies from sector to sector, role to role—and of course from person to person. It all depends what stage an employee is at in their career journey—and what their destination might look like.