The COVID-19 pandemic has left a profound impact on most businesses and their workforce. It has also encouraged organizations to successfully drive human capital transformation and adopt digital approaches- especially for corporate learning and development. Human capital transformation helps organizations prepare a future-ready workforce that is highly skilled, innovative, and productive. For employers that want to stay ahead in the competition, it is the right time to embrace the employee reskilling imperative. Reskilling is an optimal way to ensure that your employees have the essential skills to thrive in new job roles and continuously cater to the changing workplace expectations.
How to Develop a Strong Reskilling Program?
Organizations can build an effective reskilling program to bridge employee skills gaps and ensure successful human capital transformation. Following are steps that help improve the overall impact of the workforce reskilling program:
1. Close Skill Gaps
Once an organization’s business objectives and direction are apparent, leaders may need to assess how well their workforce fits into their pertinent job roles. There should be a good balance between employees’ skills and the position they acquire.
Organizations can conduct a skill gap analysis to identify relevant skills and knowledge that their employees are missing and close those gaps by unlocking their secondary s well as tertiary skills that suit their current roles.
2. Focus on Skills Adjacencies
Once you assess the essential skills required, the next step is to identify adjacent competencies or high-demand skills. Employees with adjacent skills may quickly learn what to do for the new role and perform better.
For instance, employees with good customer service experience may master skills in sales too. They may have excellent communication skills and in-depth product knowledge to drive sales and customer satisfaction.
3. Blend Different Reskilling Approaches
Organizations may choose blended reskilling methods to cater to the diverse learning styles and bridge varied skill gaps. Few examples include-
- eLearning– Online learning provides enough flexibility to employees to learn at their own pace of time and convenience. The delivery of bite-sized content helps learners quickly grasp relevant information, retain it for long, and meet a specific learning goal.
- Blended Learning– The combination of instructor-led training with online learning enables employees to learn at their own pace and interact with the instructor for queries.
- Social Learning– Employees can collaborate with their peers and learn by hands-on practice of real-world scenarios.
4. Encourage Job Shadowing
Job shadowing is another significant step where employees can undergo training on new roles within the same or across other departments. It also serves as a successful reskilling method that helps employees understand and fit into a new job role.
Observing another experienced employee can give you the exact information of the job expectations.
5. Embrace Continuous Learning Culture
Reskilling helps transform your human capital by embracing a continuous learning culture. Corporate leaders must motivate their workforce to seek reskilling and upskilling opportunities that help unlock productivity and business success.
Organizations must ensure that managers realize the importance of reskilling programs to encourage every employee to reskill and give the company an extra edge to grow and succeed.
Benefits of Workforce Reskilling
Employee reskilling to create new job opportunities during these uncertain times is crucial for organizational success. It can provide the following benefits to organizations:
– Improved Employee Engagement
Reskilling programs help create a collaborative environment where employees can feel engaged and motivated. When employees can develop new skills and unleash new areas of expertise, they feel more empathized and connected with their peers and other teams.
– Increased Employee Retention
Reskilling and retraining create ample new job opportunities for employees to stay productive at work. When employees learn and grow in a specific role, they become more focused and aligned with business requirements. Engaging reskilling programs show employees how they add value to the company, which ultimately helps increase their retention levels.
– New Talent Onboarding
An organization’s focus to improve their employees’ skills may help onboard great talent. As per a report by Gallup, 59% of Millennials rank learning and growth opportunities as extremely important to them when looking for a job.[1]
In addition, the current employees who leverage the benefits of reskilling may help improve the company’s brand presence in the market. Their positive feedback about the company’s culture may help Human Resources (HR) teams to attract great talent who can apply for new positions.
The Final Word
During these unprecedented times, where most employees are working remotely, it has become vital for them to unlock their potential through reskilling and lead to a sustainable path forward that drives successful human capital transformation. This enables organizations to prepare a future-ready workforce equipped with the desired skills, more focused on the right goals, and remain productive.
To know more about how organizations drive human capital transformation, you can read the full infographic on ‘How Corporate Training Accelerates Digital Transformation.’
