Upskilling: Investing in employees’ continual learning, identifying and filling skill gaps, and keeping people employable.

Introduction

Upskilling is all about preparing for the future

Keeping people’s skills in sync with the constantly changing world of work is the biggest talent challenge of our time. To meet this challenge, companies need to
continually upskill their people. And that means investing in all types of learning, identifying and filling skill gaps, and keeping people employable.

Investing in upskilling strategies aligns the skills of your employees to your evolving business strategy, which is critical to staying competitive. Companies that invest
in advanced upskilling strategies create a more vibrant culture, see higher employee engagement, and do a better job attracting and retaining talent.
More importantly, they can accelerate digital transformation, innovate faster, and quickly react to new market opportunities.

A future of rapid digitization and automation makes upskilling more and more important every day. Yet only 22% of HR and C-suite leaders surveyed across 17 markets said they provided training or skill-building to meet business needs, even though 91% believed it was their company’s responsibility. In that same study, nearly a third (30%) said they intended to offer skill-building opportunities but weren’t sure how.

It’s not enough to just talk about upskilling people. It’s essential to understand exactly how to put an advanced, people-focused upskilling strategy in place now. This guide will show you how to do that in seven steps. Once you complete these steps in chronological order, continue managing them in an ongoing cyclical manner. It’s an agile, iterative process.

Step No. 1

Identify Future Skills

The goal of this first step is to answer a key question: What critical skills will your workers need in the next one to three years?
Working in collaboration with crossfunctional leaders, you can answer this question for three distinct groups:

• The entire company
• Departments or business units
• Individual employees

First, consider your company’s overall business strategy and objectives. Then identify three to five skills needed by your entire company to achieve its goals.
For example, at a company that needs to embrace new advanced technologies, the most critical skills might be data science, cloud computing, and creativity.

Sometimes it makes more sense to start at the department or business unit level, especially if your company is large and has disparate lines of business. If this is
the case, start with a functional area. For example, your head of Marketing might say, “Our department really needs to focus on brand strategy.” So that becomes a
critical skill.
For individual employees, the skills identified will vary widely by role and career aspirations. It’s important that employees own their upskilling, and you can support that process with career conversations.

Generally, an employee’s aspirations should support organizational objectives.
Equally important is to keep in mind that employees who are excited about learning, whatever their motivations, help your company by building a stronger company
culture, increasing innovation, and staying with your organization longer.

Step No. 2

Assess Skills

The next step is to establish a baseline of current capabilities. It’s a common mistake to skip this step, but a baseline is incredibly important, as it allows you to
measure progress in a meaningful way. It will also help you set upskilling goals. (For more on goals, see Step No. 3.)
Focus on the three to five future skills you’ve identified as critical. You can establish your baseline for this in a couple of ways.

The first way to establish a skills baseline is to do it manually. You might do this by surveying employees through independent assessments or 360-degree reviews. You can also pull data from your human capital management (HCM) software, applicant tracking system (ATS), learning experience platform (LXP), or similar applications.
However, if they’re not integrated, it can be difficult and take a lot of time to get a full picture of skills across your organization.
And you’ll probably find yourself managing data with spreadsheets.

The second way to establish a skills baseline — one that’s more comprehensive and less labor intensive — is to use purpose-built technology that fixes the problem of fragmented and ever-evolving data sets. You can use a platform that integrates with your HR technologies, continuously collects the latest skills data from your workforce, and helps you make sure that people’s skills are up to date so you can create a dynamic talent strategy.

Step No. 3

Set Upskilling Goals

Next, you’ll want to set some upskilling goals. The key here is adding targets to your upskilling plan. More specifically, it’s about using your baseline of existing skills
to help determine how your organization will go about learning the future skills it needs to fill gaps. Again, take into account the entire company, its business units, and individual employees.

Plans for individual employees will vary. How many skills can people personally focus on at any given time? It won’t be 15 or 16, which is what you find in competency models and what makes them unwieldy and overwhelming. Instead, employees are going to have to decide on one or two skills based on their Skill Review results and identified gaps. Research suggests they’ll want guidance.

Step No. 4

Map Learning to Skills

You’ve set your upskilling goals. Now it’s time for the really fun part: figuring out the best ways to achieve them.
At this point, employees need to engage in some type of learning to build their skills and expertise. The most advanced upskilling strategies include engaging
learning experiences that help people build skills through practice, feedback, and reflection. According to the latest research report, we know that people
learn best when multiple learning methods are blended together. Breaking down how employees learn at work helps make the case for a blended approach.

How Employees Learn

Online, self directed. 65% of workers said they go to specific websites while 53% used a search engine. It makes sense that people learn online from tutorials, classes, articles, podcasts, videos, even emails.
Example: A project manager watches a once-a-month webinar series about keeping teams aligned.

Team-based learning (virtual or inperson). Example: A marketing teamwants to streamline its processes, so it participates in a team-based Agile Methodology Workshop where it restructures its processes and working model in a series of virtual and in-person learning sessions.

Peer-to-peer. 33% of employees said they ask their co-workers or go to social networks and online communities to learn from their peers. Example: A customer
service rep finds an online forum that discusses ways to deal with a difficult customer.

On-the-job. Development opportunities such as stretch assignments can increase engagement by up to 30 percent.
Example: A retail supervisor asks an associate to help manage shipping, sharing more and more instructions and increasing his responsibility over time.
Old models of work and training typically rely on pulling employees away from work to learn. It’s a transactional, command and control approach, and it’s responsible for outdated, one-size-fits-all compliance and lecture-based classroom training.

When employees have an opportunity to learn and grow their careers within a company, they’re more likely to stay. The most successful companies realize that
learning should be blended and more personalized, and that they should invest in employees regardless of how long those workers plan to stay with the organization
— whether that’s one year, five years, or ten. In exchange, they get employees who are excited to learn new skills, grow their careers inside the company, and give 110%.

Step No. 5

Measure Upskilling Progress

Your people are learning. They’re building new skills. But are they retaining those skills and putting them into practice? To answer that question, create a dashboard
to continually track progress against a series of key skill metrics. These metrics can include a skills inventory, skills ratings, and skills progression with the ultimate
goal of seeing how people are filling their skills gaps.

In addition to a skills inventory, skills ratings, and skills progression, you can track other metrics like:
• Trending skills (for example, those that employees are rating high or low)
• Skills by department or business unit (Marketing, Finance, Engineering, IT)
• Skills by group (Internal Communications within Marketing)
• Skills by role (sales development representative vs. account executive)
• Skill certifications, badges, credentials earned (from multiple sources)

Data can come from numerous places. Content providers like edX, Coursera, and Pluralsight provide a few ways for you to get insights about the skills people are
learning. Degreed helps you integrate these data points so you can understand how people are actually progressing with the skills they’ve learned from a wide
range of methods and sources.

Step No. 6

Match Skills to Opportunities

Your people have gained new skills or improved those they already had. Now it’s time to match their skills to the right opportunities — so they can continue
to learn, and so leaders and managers can see what talent already exists at the company. This is about creating a dynamic career marketplace that increases internal
mobility by connecting employees with new projects, stretch assignments, or even jobs.
Companies are increasingly investing in programs that help employees learn new skills and get new jobs without leaving for another organization. In 2016, 39%
of companies invested in internal mobility programs and by 2020 that number grew to 47%.7 And high-performance organizations are twice as likely to prioritize talent mobility.

Let’s say an employee who’s learning data science skills sees an internal project posted that lists data science as a critical skill that’s needed. The employee
can inquire or apply and then use their new skills to grow even further. At the same time, the manager or team lead gets a motivated, internal candidate. It’s
important to note that creating these stretch assignments and opportunities requires coordination and cooperation among leaders across your organization.
They need to not only post jobs and projects but also give employees time to work on them.

Step No. 7

Communicate Metrics of Success

The last step shows how your upskilling strategy is impacting your business priorities and reinforces the value that upskilling delivers. Most often, this
is information aimed at the highest leadership levels, addressing topics prioritized by the CEO or other executives.
In a 2020 report, CEOs who have advanced upskilling plans said those strategies help build a stronger company culture, increase employee engagement, boost innovation, accelerate digital transformation, and improve their ability to attract and retain talent.

Furthermore, research shows that employees stay an average of 41% longer at companies that do a good job hiring from within.
To communicate your success, choose metrics that are particularly relevant to your business priorities and important to senior leaders. These might include:
employee engagement, time to productivity, employee retention, sharing and collaboration, the percentage of people working on new assignments, and revenue growth.

In Conclusion

We can’t predict the future or every impending challenge. And while it’s too big a stretch to identify or begin building skills we’ll need in the next decade, we
can prepare for the next one to three years — by meeting the next major business challenge or industry disruption head-on with a thoughtful upskilling strategy.
Upskilling doesn’t have to be overly complicated. If you’re looking for a good place to start, talk to the head of a business unit and identify three to five
key skills employees can work on. Gather preliminary results and initial feedback, and take it step by step:

1. Identify a few future skills by talking to team leads or directors.
2. Assess critical skills of that team through surveys or technology that focuses on measuring skills.
3. Set upskilling goals that are attainable — no more than three skills per individual.
4. Map learning to skills with existing content, social learning, collaboration, mentoring, in a variety of blended learning approaches.
5. Measure progress of the team’s upskilling initiatives. Compare the data from your baseline in Step No. 2 with how employees are progressing with filling skill gaps.
6. Match skills to opportunities by offering employees visibility into projects, stretch assignments, or open internal roles that can help them further develop their new abilities.
7. Communicate metrics of success to executives and others in the company. Use intuitive visuals and focus on results that matter, like the number of people with new critical skills or increases in innovation and productivity.

Upskilling presents a huge opportunity. As a people leader, you’re in an acutely unique position to drive positive business results.

Source: Degreed