Upskill Your Workforce to Bridge the Skills Gap

In the last few years, we have entered what many call a global skills crisis. Business competition continues to remain high, skilled labor is in even greater pursuit, and many ‘old school’ roles have become obsolete due to automation. The way to keep up in this fast-paced changing environment is by upskilling your workforce to bridge the skills gap.

What does it mean to upskill?

Upskilling involves a process in which employees level up their skills, by expanding on their skill set through various learning pathways.

The Benefits of Upskilling Your Teams

Your primary purpose for upskilling your workforce will determine which strategies you use (more on this later...), for this reason, it is important to take a look at the benefits of upskilling and decide for yourself, which ones you are hoping to achieve.

Directly Investing in Your Workforce

Top talent is in high demand and to attract quality workers, you need more than just a well-oiled recruitment strategy. Upskilling your workforce allows you to invest your time and money in your existing employees rather than in recruitment.

Promoting upskilling in your organization also helps foster a culture of learning. Environments with learning embedded into their culture often have employees with boosted morale, higher job satisfaction, and increased performance.

Provide Greater Growth Opportunities

With automation, new tools and technologies, and ways of working, employees need new skills to perform their jobs successfully - upskilling works towards these objectives.

According to Deloitte Insights,

“94% [of employees] say they would stay in a company if it helped them to develop, yet only 15% can access learning directly related to their jobs.”

Providing employees with greater learning opportunities is also a wonderful way to boost employee engagement.

Talent Retention

Purpose and career development have become a greater driving motivator for many people post Covid-19. Employees want to feel their work is contributing to something greater, and to know that they’re supported and encouraged to grow and develop within a company. If they don’t have this, they’ll leave, simple as that.

Still not convinced that upskilling your workforce will benefit your organization? Check out what The World Economic Forum has to say about the economic imperative of upskilling.

The Simple How-to On Strategic Upskilling

For companies to upskill their workforce successfully and offer career development opportunities, they need to think about setting up systems for skill-based learning. Additionally, they need a strategy that will be tweaked based on why they want to upskill their team, but in general, here are a few keys for how to upskill your workforce effectively.

How to Upskill Your Workforce

• Create a customized plan that is well-researched and thought out. This usually starts with determining the skills gap while at the same time, identifying future needs. To create this plan, review the 4 strategies we share below for upskilling your workforce.
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• Identify the goals and vision the company has for its upskilling mission, and focus on skills that are key to the success of this vision. ie. if one of your goals is to automate certain tasks to reduce the time spent on them, yet your employees need more training on automation technologies, start here first.
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• Create a learning pathway for each skill you’re helping your employees develop. There’s no need for complicated systems here. All you need is a simple tool to help empower your managers to build beautiful onboarding and upskilling pathways.

4 Strategies to Upskill Your Workforce & Bridge the Skills Gap

Upskilling and/or reskilling your workforce involves good strategic planning. If you need a place to start, take a look at these 4 strategies.

1. Surveying an employee serves two purposes. First, it allows you to determine where there is a gap in their skills, and identify what their learning needs are. On the company’s side, it helps prioritize which skills need to be improved first.
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2. Build upskilling programs tailored to your employee's needs. In addition, to ensure success, you want the program to be integrated into an employee's performance and career development plan.
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3. Diversify your learning content to promote engagement and foster varied learning styles. Rather than just throw your employees into a course, offer them different formats of learning, ie. events, mentoring, articles, and podcasts - all of these serve as unique learning opportunities.
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4. Track earned skills and incentivize learning to keep employees motivated and on course, especially when it comes to challenging learning pathways. Creating a reward system for skills earned and/or gamifying the process is a fun way to keep employees engaged.

Using SuperPath to Build Your Learning Pathways

Having a clear career development plan in place, along with learning pathways tailored to your workforce, and skill-based learning that allows employees to learn in the way most suited to them is key to upskilling your workforce.

Keep in mind, it is not a one-and-done job, and upskilling is an ongoing process that often requires a lot of time, but it does not have to. With SuperPath, you can create learning pathways that have all the bells and whistles of an advanced LML but without the complexity.

√ Build your learning pathways in minutes with a library of high-quality images and an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor.

√ Add any content types to your pathways (from articles to videos, podcasts, and more), so that the learning pathways are diverse for all types of learners.

√ Assign learning pathways directly to employees or a full team.

√ Track learning progress with due dates, prerequisites, and more to help your employees develop the skills they need to be successful in their roles.

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