Technology, office demands, and economic demands are evolving unprecedented speed in today’s competitive business environment. Advances in enterprise software driven by continuous digital transformation are leading to an increased demand for new competencies and skill sets.
For an organization to stay competitive, it must have a workforce with the right skills to be productive, innovative, and ultimately drive more revenue.
Creating a learning and development initiative around employee reskilling is a way to ensure your workforce has the skills needed to thrive and help your organization grow.
Reskilling
Reskilling is a process where employees learn new skills to move into a different job role within the organization or to meet the new demands of a current role.
It typically occurs when an employee’s previous tasks or responsibilities become irrelevant, often due to advances in technology or skill gaps.
Why Is Reskilling Important Now
Skill development has always been important, but COVID-19 has increased the stakes. It dramatically expedited the process of digitization. The pandemic left no choice for companies that were previously reluctant to switch from legacy systems to new cloud-based platforms.
Embracing digital transformation and the integration of new technology into business practices is now every leader’s responsibility, regardless of job function or industry.
This digital transformation led to a sharp rise in the development of new systems and software, reducing the shelf-life of current technical skills and creating a demand for new skill sets.
Digital transformation has increased the demand for digital skills such as AI and machine learning, as they drive productivity, automate processes, and perform complex computational tasks quickly.
Organizations must invest in their workforce reskilling to adapt to these changing conditions. Otherwise, they stand to lose market position and fade to their competition.
Prioritizing employee training programs to emphasize reskilling will help organizations remain competitive and continue to deliver on net-positive outcomes.
And just as significantly, building industry-relevant skills will help employees stay up-to-date on the latest trends in their field.
Benefits of Reskilling for Organizations
Here are a few benefits of implementing reskilling programs in your organization.
1. Reduced training and hiring costs
Hiring new employees is a costly endeavor for organizations, with a significant amount of money being invested in both the new hire, their employee onboarding process, and role training programs accompanied by new-hire onboarding and training programs.
New hire training not only involves training in specific job roles but also in company processes, software, and protocol, which your current employees are already well aware of.
When you have current employees reskilled to be working in different job roles across the organization, if and when their current position becomes obsolete, you can save the money spent on onboarding costs and overall employee training costs.
2. Retain your best employees
Reskilling promotes employee retention by reducing voluntary employee separations.
Providing reskilling programs enables employees to contribute more skills to your company, helps them stay competitive, makes them stay with your organization for longer, and showcases to them that you believe in their future at the company and that you’re willing to invest in them for the long haul.
3. Develop your employees’ skills
Reskilling training programs give employees the chance to improve on both personal and professional levels.
It provides a baseline for an employee development plan that provides reskill training to keep up with the fast-paced changes in technology and future-proof their careers.
4. Retain company knowledge and processes
Between the Great Resignation, layoffs, elimination of old roles, and general employee turnover, company knowledge loss is a big concern for organizations.
When an experienced employee leaves, all of your company’s valuable information, which takes years to obtain, is lost.
Reskilling your employees with the internal company knowledge they need allows you to retain your best team members.
Furthermore, these employees have invaluable company knowledge, which enables them to work without assistance, complete tasks more quickly, and generate higher quality products.
5. Higher workplace moral
Career pathing visibly demonstrates that your organization values its people. It provides comfort in the working environment and encourages employees to feel happier, satisfied, and motivated in their roles.
6. More versatile employees
As employees expand their skill set through reskilling, they become more versatile in their roles, gaining a way to elevate their positions within the organization.
Reskilling enables the internal mobility of employees within the company. Internal mobility offers considerable benefits, including a reduction in time and money spent on hiring, improved employee retention rates, and greater diversity and innovation in the workplace.
For instance, an employee working with the customer relationship team replaced by customer feedback software might be moved to the public relations team.
The employee can show off their highly transferable skills and use their knowledge of customer dealing to bring fresh ideas and perspectives to the team.
7. Meeting future demand
Targeting the development of key skills in your existing workforce prepares you to meet future demand.
This not only prepares your employees for challenges they will inevitably face, it will also provide your team members with the skills they need to be agile and adaptive in the workplace.
8. Improves reputation for the company
Today’s top talent looks for employers committed to investing in their employees. The right reskilling strategy makes your organization more attractive in the eyes of both your current workforce and potential hires.
Benefits of Reskilling for Employees
Here are a few benefits of reskilling from the employee perspective.
1. More job security
Reskilling provides a greater sense of job security for employees as it increases their value within the company. It showcases that their role requires niche knowledge and skills, and that their company is willing to invest in them.
2. Learn new skills for career advancement
For employees looking to change career paths on their own, reskilling helps them reach their goals. This is especially important as the speed of digital transformation continues unabated, and automation and AI eliminate many roles.
3. Option for internal mobility
Reskilling offers employees a better chance of staying with the company as the more skills an employee obtains, the more eligible they are for versatile or elevated roles within the company.
Apart from maintaining their place within the company, reskilling gives employees a jump start to expand their skills and gain higher positions later.
How to Organize a Reskilling Program
1. Create a list of potential positions where people can be relocated
The beginning of any successful project starts with a plan, and that’s why you need to make this list. Rather than focusing only on positions that will be eliminated, also focus on the roles that your growing company will need to fill.
Remember, you also need to consider that certain roles require specific training. You may also need to group roles for reskilling to make it more effective.
To do this, look at your company’s future. Will you expand into new markets or develop new products? Are you going to offer enhanced company support to customers? Find the areas where you will need staff to expand your company.
Then, decide which areas of growth are most important to your company.
If you’re primarily focused on developing a new product, you’ll need more people working on development and marketing. Also, rank tasks that are less important to your company’s growth.
Remember, not all of these role transitions will be immediate. You might need a department to finish their big project before transitioning the employees to a new role.
Remember that not all reskilling involves just transitioning employees from one department to another. In fact, reskilling is a great opportunity to promote employees to higher positions, while reskilling other suitable employees for the promoted person’s role.
For example:
John’s data analysis role is taken over by new software. However, many of his managers see his talent for communicating with customers and his fellow employees. He is also seen as very persuasive, and so the company trains him to take over a sales role.
Another example:
Jen and Amy are both in the file clerk role. However, Jen has been with the company longer and knows some duties outside of her own. The file clerk role will soon be minimized to include only one employee since much of the work is being replaced by a computer program.
Because of Jen’s experience and knowledge, she’s promoted to office manager. Amy is reskilled to take the role of a sole file clerk, which means learning the knowledge Jen has picked up over the years.
2. Define people who can be included in the program
This is one of the more difficult parts of creating a reskilling program because you have to evaluate every employee, as well as their current roles, and the future of those positions.
You might not be able to reskill every worker, so you need to define what makes a worker suitable for new roles and grade them on their eligibility for each role.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What are the definitions and criteria of the employees eligible to switch roles?
- What departments are to be considered for reskilling?
- How will you grade employees’ suitability for reskilling?
- How do the benefits of reskilling weigh against the risks?
Decide the rubric or grading system you will use to determine who is suited for reskilling, and which roles are worth commuting.
It can be a simple system. For example, you can use a scale between 1 and 3. 1 means workers perform exceptionally, 2 means they perform at an average level, and 3 means they perform below expectation.
Or, you can create a more complex evaluation system, based on a skill matrix, and then include a more versatile grading system.
3. Define areas for improvements
Employees that can take on new roles might still need some help learning or improving skills before you reskill them.
For example, an employee might be very good at sales but needs to improve how they fill out paperwork and important documents. You can coach employees to make improvements that will make them more suitable for reskilling and taking on a new role.
Using your list of possible employees for reskilling, define which area each one will need to improve to be successful in a new role.
This guide on areas for employee development can direct you where to look at and what areas you can improve. Look at the skills that your employees already have, and see what they will need to learn to be successful in a new role.
For example, a customer support specialist will be reskilled to take on customer retention roles. The CSR software works much the same for both roles, in essence, however, customer retention requires a little more in-depth knowledge of the system.
Therefore customer support specialists will need more training on the advanced aspects of the software to take on their new roles.
4. Choose methods
Choosing methods for reskilling is very similar to choosing methods to train employees.
In general, methods can include workshops, where groups of employees can learn new skills together, or mentoring, where another experienced employee tutors another employee that needs to learn the skills for their new role.
If you already have a training program for new employees, you can even use the same methods to reskill employees.
5. Create a detailed plan for key roles and positions
An employee development plan will help you streamline the process of getting reskilled employees into their new roles. Some general roles don’t need extensive planning, although you should briefly outline them.
Take more time when you create a plan for key roles and positions that hold more responsibility. You can choose the level of detail that best suits your organization.
6. Define needed time and resources
Reskilling, like any other type of training, takes time and resources. While you don’t need to plan this step out to the minutiae, you do need a general idea of how long reskilling should take for each role.
- Will you need one on one mentors for certain roles?
- Can reskilling training be done with e-learning courses?
- Do you have an LXP (learning experience program) or LMS (learning management system) to facilitate the process?
Decide which method of training will be most beneficial, and how much time, money, and other resources it will require.
7. Negotiate with potential candidates
Keep in mind that not every employee will jump at the chance to leave their current role, even if they realize that role will soon be eliminated. This is a sensitive topic, as people are always uneasy about uncertainty, and the possibility of losing their jobs.
When people are already experiencing economic struggles, they may be more likely to agree to reskilling. However, it’s still important to approach this conversation diplomatically, and let the employees know why it’s important for the company, and how reskilling can benefit them.
8. Launch the program, adjust as needed
Once you have your plan in place, it’s time to get started and launch the program.
As you begin your reskilling program, keep an eye on training and progress. Don’t be afraid to make changes if certain aspects of your reskilling program aren’t working.
You may need to make adjustments for individuals, entire departments, or even parts of your plan like your timeline or how you budget resources.
Making small changes can ultimately lead to drastic improvements.
