Upskilling is when you train employees on soft or hard skills they need for their current work or for work in the future of your company. It allows you to stop worrying about finding job candidates with the right set of skills, instead focusing on improving existing talent within your company. Upskilling can also help your employees feel more fulfilled and excited about the growth in their job. Even though upskilling has many benefits, it can be difficult to implement. Here are some ways to make upskilling easier:
Evaluate Your Company Needs
An upskilling initiative can easily fall apart if it doesn’t have a focus. Before starting your upskilling initiative, you should evaluate what your company needs. Come up with a specific goal for the upskilling program as well as a time frame. This will make it easier to create a focused plan.
Create a Plan
There are a lot of different skills you could possibly train your employees on, but what skills are actually vital? Look at the upskilling goal you came up with and align it with the skills you plan to provide training on. Focus your plan only on the skills that are most important to keep your efforts consistent.
Teach to the Individual
A part of upskilling is identifying an employee’s existing skills, and expanding them. To do this, you need to tailor your upskilling program to fit to the individual. Consider training through a variety of resources and methods to allow for different learning styles. If feasible, make individual plans for all of the employees who will be going through the upskilling training.
Make Changes
As you introduce your upskilling program, there are likely to be snags along the way. Take the time to identify the challenges and work through them to improve your program. Also, you should evaluate how well the program is working and whether it is meeting your goal.
Talk to the managers in your organization about implementing an upskilling program to help fill in gaps in knowledge and skills at your organization and make your employees feel more fulfilled.