skills development: 7 strategies for reskilling your workforce.

Businesses and employees have much to gain from technical skill development. Organizations get access to emerging skills and capabilities that contribute to future performance while workers experience greater engagement in their work and long-term employability.

Reskilling has become more important than ever in the current era of digital transformation, a fundamental change in how businesses and industries operate. It's critical to make reskilling a priority for your organization right now rather than viewing it as a 'nice to have' or an objective to achieve at some point in the future.

Taking immediate action requires the whole business to be on board with the project — from senior managers all the way down to junior team members. One way to empower employees and sell your reskilling or upskilling program is to offer it as a way to manage career tracks.

To ensure your reskilling activities are relevant and productive, you should have a clear idea of your current position with regard to competencies in the workforce. It can be useful to do some dedicated research into the skills and experience already crucial in your sector and identify likely skills gaps in the future. 

What are the most significant emerging trends, challenges and opportunities in your industry, and do you have the necessary qualities and capacity to respond to them? 

This type of skills analysis provides a better understanding of the skillset your company already has in place in comparison with the skills it needs. This comparison can help your company identify potential skill gaps within the company,  such as in digital skills, that could prove problematic in the future.

Researching the current state of skills in your workforce and identifying trends in the wider market will help with another crucial part of the skills-building process: identifying the goals you want to achieve.

You should establish clear and tangible outcomes that you want to gain from this endeavor. By creating a valuable structure and plan for your reskilling efforts, you can better gauge results as the project progresses. 

One approach that can prove beneficial is to set goals that are SMART:

• specific
• measurable
• achievable
• relevant
• time-bound

This can be just as useful for individual workers as it is for the HR department and the business as a whole. An example of a SMART goal that could add focus to your reskilling program is to increase the number of IT staff enrolled in cybersecurity training schemes by 20% over the next 6 months.

Like any undertaking in business, you can't expect worthwhile results from reskilling if you don't have the right kind and proper amount of resources to support your efforts.

Fortunately, there are provisions that can boost your efforts to enrich competencies in your workforce even if you have diverse and geographically distributed teams of remote workers. These range from free resources like massive open online courses and publicly available videos on relevant subjects to more specialty services like industry certifications and training programs endorsed by professional associations.

You can find training modules that cover skills development as a whole or ones that specialize in certain areas, including:

• technical skill development
• soft skill development
• leadership skill development

One of the biggest challenges linked to reskilling and developing your workforce is learner engagement. If you want employees to have a genuine desire to learn and constantly refresh their skill sets, it's essential to deliver positive, relevant experiences that reflect people's interests and priorities.

Engage with your staff to find out what they're interested in learning about, how they see their career progressing and where they experience a job skills gap. This could also be an ideal opportunity to talk about people's preferred approaches to learning and what platforms, methods and environments they would feel most comfortable with.

Surprisingly, considering all the focus on reskilling and worker training among HR professionals and corporate leadership, only 20% of employees surveyed in the 2022 LinkedIn Learning Report felt learning was a top priority at their workplace. Therefore, to facilitate an attitude of learning, you need to ensure everyone, from top managers to the newest hires, understands your organization's talent development mission.

Ongoing testing and iteration can help you ensure your workforce learning and reskilling activities are constantly evolving, improving and responding to the latest developments relevant to your business and industry.

You can evaluate how your programs are functioning by collecting feedback from participants and inviting suggestions about what improvements could be made in the future.

It could also help to focus on areas of performance or productivity you hope will benefit from reskilling. Start by conducting a baseline assessment of your most relevant performance metrics and track how these indicators shift as your employees' skill set advances. By quantifying results, you'll be able to make informed conclusions about which aspects of your reskilling project are working well and where you need to change your approach.

Reskilling shouldn't be viewed simply as a 'one off' or as a short-term response to a unique challenge like a digital transformation or new project but as an ongoing process that is part of the ethos and culture of your company. 

It's important, therefore, to make sure the budget you dedicate to this process is protected for the long term. This might require you to put forward a strong business case for the ongoing value of reskilling — another reason it's so crucial to constantly collect data and analyze the impact of your work in this area, as noted in the previous step.