5 Ways to Up skill Your Workforce

Technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics are evolving at a rapid rate. Unfortunately, most education institutes and businesses are falling behind in equipping people with the practical and most in-demand skills to leverage these technologies.

This is known as the digital skills gap. In the field of Human Resources, this gap is even more dramatic. Not only do we need to tackle the problem for ourselves, but we also need the ability to understand where the business lacks the skills necessary to keep up with the pace of technology.

And we need to create platforms for other functions to bridge the gaps they are facing. It is the daunting task of HR to take on this massive upskilling project.

Today we will dive into one of the most relevant topics for HR professionals today: upskilling your workforce. But before we dive into upskilling and the different strategies to tackle it, remember to subscribe to our newsletter.

1. Learning and development

Upskilling via learning and development or L&D programs is probably the most obvious way to go. The L&D programs, however, are the result of a larger learning and development strategy.

So every organization will go about training their employees differently. Nevertheless, most organizations go through a similar process when developing their training strategy. There are typically four phases required:

• An analysis of training needs (for instance through a skills gap analysis)
• Determining learning objectives
• Designing the training content and method
• Monitoring and evaluating

The analysis of training needs should be the starting point for each organization and based on its results, you can determine the best approach for creating a training program. Depending on the resources available, you’ll need to decide which skills you are going to train in-house, for which to acquire training, and which skills to outsource completely.

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. – John F. Kennedy

In practice, this means that some organizations will choose to: Create an “upskill track” on their own LMS. Others will acquire access to platforms like Coursera or Udemy that provide courses on any level for any function of the organization.

While others will prefer to collaborate with companies like ours to provide specific training for a specialized area of the business.

2. Job rotation

Job rotation is a key technique in job redesign. It is the practice of moving employees between jobs in an organization. And it can be an excellent way to transfer specific skills, knowledge, and competencies. These rotations are mostly lateral – meaning that they take place between jobs on the same level.

They are also often temporary so people tend to move back to their original job after a certain period. For example, managers may need experience in different departments before they’re ready for a senior leadership position in which they need this experience.

Similarly, HR professionals sometimes lack business skills. A good way to build these skills is by rotating them outside the HR department.

3. Job enrichment

Job enrichment is a process that is characterized by adding extra dimensions to existing jobs.

Examples include increasing skill variety, creating more autonomy, and giving feedback. While the main goal of job enrichment is to make jobs more motivating, it can have the ‘bonus’ advantage of upskilling people at the same time. The simple fact of increasing skill variety implies that employees will have to expand their abilities.

4. Peer coaching & Peer mentoring

While peer coaching and peer mentoring certainly have similarities, they’re not the same thing.

With peer mentoring, a more experienced employee teaches knowledge and skills to a less experienced worker. The mentor also provides guidance. Peer mentoring can be a valuable (and often underestimated) way of upskilling people.

A lot of the taken-for-granted knowledge of employees comes from their personal experience and interactions with colleagues. This kind of tacit knowledge is hard to transfer since it often isn’t recorded in a database, standard operating procedure, or formal training program.

Peer coaching, on the other hand, exposes employees to a bigger range of workplace skills. What’s attractive about this form of upskilling is that it has a more informal side to it: people have a peer they can talk to directly, ask questions when they come up, and learn from them, by watching their peers work.

If, for example, you pair up a marketeer with a content director, this will create mutual opportunities for learning new skills and increasing each other’s basic knowledge of their respective field of expertise.

“Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.” – Brain Tracy

5. Hire external experts (outsourcing)

Sometimes, you need to upskill people but you don’t have the in-house capacity to do so. Either because you need employees with certain skills as soon as possible and training them would simply take too long.

Or perhaps because the skills you need are so new that you don’t have the knowledge and experience to start upskilling people. In the current context, this can, for instance, be the case regarding digital skills and technical skills like programming and app development.

A solution might be to hire freelance specialists or contractors. These people can bring the exact skills, competencies, and experience you need to get started on a new project. By teaming up these external experts with the right people from within the company, you create an upskilling opportunity.

Ideally, by the time the project is done, you will have built the capability that was previously lacking in-house or you would have developed an L&D strategy that will do so in the not too distant future.

This concludes our brief introduction to the 5 methods of upskilling your workforce. If you want to identify the biggest gaps in the skill set of your employees, you can download the Freerecruit_Skills_Gap_Analysis step-by-step guide we have created for you! You only need to click on the link above to download it for free.