7 Steps For Upskilling Your Workforce

Get ready for what’s next

The world of work has changed beyond recognition in the past few months. Job roles, working styles and business strategies are all continuing to evolve rapidly and as a result, businesses face one of the biggest challenges of our time. Keeping people's skills in sync with the constantly changing world of work.

Upskilling is your answer. Companies that invest in advanced upskilling strategies create a more vibrant culture, see higher employee engagement, and do a better job attracting and retaining talent. More importantly, they can accelerate digital transformation, innovate faster, and quickly react to new market opportunities.
 

In fact, IBM’s 2016 WorkTrends report found that 70% of workers said they’d leave their companies to fully use their existing skills, and 65% said they’d leave to learn new skills. But, it's not enough to just talk about upskilling people. It’s essential to understand exactly how to put an advanced, people-focused upskilling strategy in place now.

Here, are the seven steps you can take now to get ready for what’s next. 

Identify Future Skills

Ask yourself: what critical skills will your workers need in the next one to three years? Working in collaboration with cross-functional leaders, you can answer this question for three distinct groups:
 

• The entire company
• Departments or business units
• Individual employees

First, consider your company’s overall business strategy and objectives. Then identify three to five skills needed by your entire company to achieve its goals. For example, at a company that needs to embrace new advanced technologies, the most critical skills might be data science, cloud computing, and creativity. 

It could make more sense to start at the department or business unit level, especially if your company is large and has disparate lines of business. If this is the case, start with a functional area. For example, your Head of Marketing might say, “Our department really needs to focus on brand strategy.” So that becomes a critical skill. 

For individual employees, the skills identified will vary widely by role and career aspirations. It’s important that workers own their upskilling, and you can support that process with career conversations. Generally, a worker’s aspirations should support organisational objectives. Equally important is to keep in mind that employees who are excited about learning help your company by building a stronger company culture, increasing innovation, and staying with your company longer. 

Assess Skills

The next step is to establish a baseline of current skills and capabilities within the company. Far too many leaders miss this step, but a baseline is valuable as it allows you to measure progress in a meaningful way. It will also help you set upskilling goals. 

Focus on the three to five future skills you’ve identified as critical, then establish the baseline. The first way to do this is manually, for example by surveying workers through independent assessments or 360-degree reviews. If you have these systems available, you can also pull data from your human capital management software, applicant tracking system, learning experience platform, or similar applications. However, this can be very labour intensive. 

The second way to establish a skills baseline is to use purpose-built technology that fixes the problem of fragmented and ever-evolving data sets. You can use a platform that integrates with your HR technologies, continuously collects the latest skills data from your workforce, and helps you make sure that people’s skills are up to date so you can create a dynamic talent strategy. 

Set Upskilling Goals

Next, you’ll want to set some upskilling goals by adding targets to your upskilling plan. More specifically, it’s about using your baseline of existing skills to help determine how your organization will go about learning the future skills it needs to fill gaps. Again, make sure you take into account the entire company, its business units, and individual employees. 

Plans for individual employees will vary. How many skills can people personally focus on at any given time? It won’t be 15 or 16, which is what you find in competency models and what makes them unwieldy and overwhelming. Instead, with your guidance, employees are going to have to decide on one or two skills based on their Skill Review results and identified gaps. 

Map Learning to Skills 

You’ve set your upskilling goals and now it’s time for the really fun part: figuring out the best ways to achieve them. 

At this point, employees need to engage in some type of learning to build their skills and expertise. The most advanced upskilling strategies include engaging learning experiences that help people build skills through practice, feedback, and reflection. According to our latest research report, people learn best when multiple learning methods are blended in the following four ways: 

Online and self-directed: It makes sense that people learn online from tutorials, classes, articles, podcasts, videos, even emails. For example, a project manager watches a once-a-month webinar series about keeping teams aligned.

Team-based learning (virtual or in-person): For example, a marketing team wants to streamline its processes, so it participates in a team-based Agile Methodology Workshop where it restructures its processes and working model in a series of learning sessions.

Peer-to-peer: 33% of employees said they ask their co-workers or go to social networks and online communities to learn from their peers, such as a customer service rep finds an online forum that discusses ways to deal with a difficult customer

On-the-job: Development opportunities such as stretch assignments can increase engagement by up to 30 percent.  For example, a retail manager asks an associate to help manage shipping, sharing more and more instructions and increasing his responsibility over time.

Measure Upskilling Progress

Your people are learning. They’re building new skills. All of this is brilliant, but are they retaining those skills and putting them into practice? To answer that question, create a dashboard to continually track progress against a series of key skill metrics. These metrics can include a skills inventory, skills ratings, and skills progression with the ultimate goal of seeing how people are filling their skills gaps.

In addition to a skills inventory, skills ratings, and skills progression, you can track other metrics including: 
 

• Trending skills (for example, those that   employees are rating high or low)
• Skills by department or business unit (Marketing, Finance, Engineering, IT)
• Skills by group (Internal Communications within Marketing)
• Skills by role (sales development representative vs. account executive)
• Skill certifications, badges, credentials earned (from multiple sources)

Match Skills to Opportunity 

Your people have gained new skills or improved those they already had. Now it’s time to match their skills to the right opportunities so they can continue to learn, and so leaders and managers can see what talent already exists at the company. This is about creating a dynamic career marketplace that increases internal mobility by connecting employees with new projects, stretch assignments, or even jobs. 

Companies are increasingly investing in programs that help employees learn new skills and get new jobs without leaving for another organization. In 2016, 39% of companies invested in internal mobility programs and by 2020 that number grew to 47%. 

Let’s say an employee who’s learning data science skills sees an internal project posted that lists data science as a critical skill that’s needed. The employee can inquire or apply and then use their new skills to grow even further. At the same time, the manager or team lead gets a motivated, internal candidate. 

Communicate Metrics of Success

The last step shows how your upskilling strategy is impacting your business priorities and reinforces the value that upskilling delivers. Most often, this is information aimed at the highest leadership levels, addressing topics prioritized by the CEO or other executives. 

To communicate your success, choose metrics that are particularly relevant to your business priorities and important to senior leaders. These might include: employee engagement, time to productivity, employee retention, sharing and collaboration, the percentage of people working on new assignments, and revenue growth.

As the past few months have shown us, we can’t predict the future. And while it’s too big a stretch to identify or begin building skills we’ll need in the next decade, we can prepare for the next couple of years by meeting the next major business challenge or industry disruption head-on with a thoughtful upskilling strategy. Upskilling doesn’t have to be overly complicated. Gather preliminary results and initial feedback, and take it step by step.

Kelly Palmer is Chief Learning Officer at Degreed. Visit https://degreed.com/  Connect Kelly Palmer