Technological advancements are constantly challenging the modern workforce. Additionally, the Great Resignation’s effects after the pandemic are worsening the crisis of digital skills across industries. At the World Economic Forum meeting in 2022, Aiman Ezzat (CEO of Capgemini SE) stated that there needs to be a “massive reskilling of the digital economy” to keep up with demand and that businesses are not doing enough.
Companies all over the world need to quickly upskill their workforce if they want to remain competitive and relevant. Businesses with employees who can adopt new technologies and are digitally mature will be more flexible and productive. On the other hand, staff members want to work for progressive organizations, provide training in digital skills, and promote career development.
Therefore, it is urgent to not only determine which skills you need internally but also to determine where the gaps in your skill and knowledge delivery are.
6 Strategies To Upskill Your Business Workforce
Let’s examine six practical methods for developing a business and workforce that can use digital technologies to spur expansion and income.
1. Adopt Continuous Professional Development
Continuous professional development offers your workforce the chance to obtain certifications throughout their career in addition to providing them with skills training. But as opposed to more conventional training programs, why concentrate on providing professional qualifications for your workforce? Having staff members complete well-known training courses guarantees, they have the expertise needed in their line of work to outperform your rivals.
Professional certifications can significantly improve your digital skills and provide a depth of knowledge that is unmatched by many other learning methods. Unfortunately, some people assume that just because you’re offering a certification, it must be generic and intended to provide anyone with a broad range of digital skills. But the benefit of continuous professional development is that you arm your staff with customized skills to address your specific business needs.
2. Incorporate Microlearning
Microlearning entails providing brief training sessions on specialized skills to your staff members. This will enable you to focus on your workforce’s key problem areas or close the skills gap without expending excessive resources or requiring key personnel to take excessive time off from their duties. This method of education is also adaptable. You can pick the microlearning courses that are crucial for any given role in your company from a selection that is available to you.
For instance, marketers might require social media training to enable them to utilize platforms and engage prospects. You can save time and boost productivity by having employees learn what is essential for their tasks. You can provide employees with access to training as needed by using microlearning. Employees can access new modules as they take on more duties.
3. Retraining
You might need to hire workers with new skills when your company makes investments in new technology or modifies the way it conducts business. However, you might find that there aren’t enough technically gifted people to go around when you try to hire them. According to Gartner, technology skills “no longer have a strong IT foundation; instead, they must be integrated across organizational functions and businesses and combined with soft skills to achieve transformation success.”
There are probably talented individuals in your company who haven’t received the training necessary to fill the new skill gap in your business. You can acquire technical talent for less money by investing in retraining some of these workers. They have valuable knowledge from their current position and are already a part of your workplace culture.
The advantages of retraining staff for positions within your business are obvious, from avoiding competition to luring in technical or digital talent to preserving staff loyalty. You cannot, however, afford to concentrate solely on your employees with the lowest technical aptitude.
4. Refresh Your Knowledge
Some of the workers you have are already comfortable using technology, and they actively seek out new education and in-demand skills on their own. These workers are valuable, but research shows that if you don’t give them a chance to develop their skills further, you risk losing them.
Employees who feel that their skills are not being used effectively in their current position are 10 times more likely to be looking for a new position than those who feel that their skills are being used effectively, according to LinkedIn’s 2022 Workplace Learning report. This demonstrates how crucial it is to value your employees in order to encourage retention and keep talent within your company.
The same study discovered that leadership and development, upskilling or reskilling, and digital upskilling or digital transformation will be the top three focus areas of learning and development (L&D) programs in 2022. Your HR or L&D team needs to make sure to nurture your most experienced staff as well, even though you may be concentrating on updating employees who are behind.
This will benefit you by increasing loyalty and honing your skills. Allied Market Research shows corporate education costs more than $300 billion annually.
5. Implement Peer Support Programs
Internal training opportunities shouldn’t be disregarded in your plans to upskill your workforce. Make the most of your digitally savvy employees’ abilities by implementing a peer support program. Employee skill-sharing is possible, and since they are already familiar with your workplace, they can make the training extremely applicable to your company. Programs for peer support are wise for another reason.
In 2022, 49% of organizations will increase their spending on learning and development, up from 41% in 2021 and a 20% year-over-year increase, according to a Capterra survey of HR leaders. However, if you’re under a financial strain, this kind of increase might not be feasible, so a peer support program might be the best option for you. Investing in outside training requires more resources than using your current workforce to train your employees.
You can upskill a larger portion of your workforce for a lower overall cost if you can bring your least experienced employees up to par with your other employees.
6. Present new career options
Automation and the emergence of artificial intelligence may cause some career paths in your organization to dry up, but they should also lead to the creation of new ones. Early investments in providing those options can assist you in keeping employees on board rather than letting them go. As long as the necessary training is made available to employees to upskill them in the necessary skills, flexibility and career advancement should be possible, given that we are in the era of hybrid and remote working.
Take AT&T as an example, which encourages and supports new career paths for employees. In 2021, 210,000 employees were reached by the company’s training initiatives, which also established a culture of ongoing education and skill improvement. AT&T University provides individualized training, mentoring, and career development programs. It invested $158 million in direct employee training and professional development programs, and in 2021, it will have delivered 15 million training hours, or 43 hours of training, for every employee.