The following information is condensed from Derrick Thompson’s, “Be Proactive by Expanding Employees’ Skills.”
In light of the pandemic and digital transformation, now is the moment to ensure workers have the skills to support shifting business needs.
Research indicates that one of the top 10 Learning and Development trends is to repurpose business talent to build a sustainable workforce.
92% of leaders surveyed said companies should take on the challenge of reskilling their workforce, and almost half are focused on making sure employees have soft skills. (See ibT’s March 25th Opportunities to Learn and Grow – Reap the Benefits of Organizational Communication, listing over half of the Business Soft Skills ibT offers).
Reskilling and upskilling are more urgent in the time of COVID, so organizations that are accelerating their digitalization efforts must make learning a critical component of their business transformation. Organizations must keep a watchful eye on what roles are vulnerable to advances in automation and what skills employees will need to support anticipated future business shifts.
Five ways Learning & Development Leaders can redeploy talent:
- Employ microlearning strategies. Provide learning opportunities in bite-size portions, enables employees to rapidly reskill to better support new business initiatives and evolving market conditions.
- Incentivize learning & development opportunities. Inspire employees to invest time in internal and external learning opportunities to build and enhance their skill sets.
- Manage and document occupation-based training. Support training options specific to different roles. Doing so enables your organization to track the skills employees have and are developing and identify how those skills can transfer to other positions within the organization.
- Facilitate career transitions. Provide training and career support. Ongoing advances in technology will continue to eliminate the need for more roles. By equipping employees with new skills, companies can help workers that would have been displaced with skills to stay active and productive.
- Make upskilling part of the review process. During performance review conversations, managers and employees can work together to develop employee’s skills and increase the employee’s productivity and value to the company.
These five strategies are beneficial to both employees and employers. The strategies will decrease the skills gap, enable companies to build a more sustainable workforce, build stability and value.
The report concludes that 87% of employers believe reskilling/training employees helps with retention. Two class offerings that may be of interest to help manage your training initiative:
Knowledge Management: Implement a plan to harness and enhance both the individual and collective brainpower of your business.
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