Strategize to Upskill Your Workforce

Remember, upskilling is crucial for businesses to stay relevant. Either you upskill your employees or risk losing them. Employee retention is more valuable or cost-friendly than hiring a new employee. You must invest in ongoing training of your employees to retain talent. If your people feel like they have stopped learning or adding value to their resumes, they begin to look elsewhere. Besides, a lack of requisite skills in your workforce threatens your future business growth.

This blog digs into the top strategies businesses must implement to upskill their workforce.

How to Upskill Your Workforce

Strategy #1

Build a Training Plan

Begin by recognizing the skills your workforce must learn or improve if they already possess those skills. Later, build a training plan addressing those skills. The best way is to provide a combination of on-the-job training, online courses, and workshops.

Strategy #2

Execute a Mentorship Program

An effective means to upskill your workforce are mentorship programs. Couple your experienced employees with less experienced ones to offer feedback, guidance, and support. This implies that experienced employees can mentor freshers or inexperienced employees and greatly help them.

Strategy #3

Boost Continuous Learning

You should encourage constant learning among your employees so that they can hone their skills. While on the job, employees need to learn a new skill or sharpen an existing one. Doing so results in their career growth and better business success. You can boost continuous learning by providing incentives, like reimbursement for educational courses or paid time off for learning.

Strategy #4

Offer Resource Access

You must offer your employees access to learning resources. Allowing them access to a learning management system enables them to enroll in courses per their job requirement or, if they want to, according to their current needs. Access to industry publications, professional associations, and online training platforms assists your employees in staying updated with current trends and developments.

Strategy #5

Make Job Rotations

Through job rotations, your people can acquire new skills at job and gain perspectives. They learn what they must do in a specific job role. When you offer job rotations within your organization for a short period, your employees develop novel skills and a better understanding of the varied business areas, which helps them as and when needed.

Strategy #6

Consider Skilling to be a Business Investment

Leaders should consider skilling as a business investment, with clearly defined people, business, and learning KPIs as a point of commencement for the program design. Let us take an example to understand this better. A real estate firm from Asia undertaking a leadership development program designed it by defining the end business objectives first: a two-fold boost in target achievement for land acquisition through faster decision-making and 50% faster time to new market entry.

Strategy #7

Empower Learning with Data

In every step of a user’s learning journey, data can be used to inform decision-making. Learning design and delivery is art as well as science. An AI (artificial intelligence) tool can look at an employee’s career graph and job experience, analyze the skills gap, and personalize the learning experience. You may even run A/B tests on multiple formats of the program or learning modes for different cohorts. Data can make decisions as programs scale.

Are you ready to upskill?

Upskilling your employees isn’t easy and doesn’t happen in a day. You must think ahead, draw up a plan with your HR department, and excite your employees about learning new skills, with them taking the time and effort to learn while working. You may also consider an employee experience platform to help your employees upskill easily. You know that employee engagement, satisfaction, productivity, and retention, are quite a few benefits of upskilling. With the above strategies, your upskilling program is well worth your resources.