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With some planning, your organization can reap the rewards of upskilling in short order. Here are six strategies for successful upskilling and reskilling for the digital workplace:
1. Identify Shared Areas of Needed Improvement
Organizations that take this first step in identifying priority areas for skilling their workforce will see the highest return on their training investment. Upskilling may involve introducing new technologies to employees, and just as often as not, ensuring the team is utilizing existing software to its full potential. The idea here is to target areas of improvement shared by a large cross-section of employees.
2. Use Experts Within or Outside of Your Company
Your organization likely has employees who are more skilled in a particular area than their
co-workers. These skilled employees can train or mentor others who need to bring up their
competencies. Depending on the skills that need to be taught and the dynamics of your
organization, there are a couple of approaches to worker-to-worker training. Organizations can pair up employees for one-on-one instruction. Alternatively, skilled employees can provide training sessions, either as a single session or as a series.
If training led by personnel is not possible, companies usually have great success in having
experts outside of the company lead training on specific skills.
3. Incorporate Skills Training into Performance Reviews
Attaining certain competencies through upskilling can be worked into an employee’s
performance goals and tied to a future promotion. This shows your workforce how upskilling is important to individual growth within a company and goes far in establishing a company culture that values employee learning.
4. Offer Learning Stipends
For organizations that cannot organize in-house training, another option is offering a learning stipend to fund employees’ upskilling opportunities. Allowing employees to choose a course to improve their digital skills may also be preferred in situations where the workforce does not have a common area of needed improvement.
5. Assign Stretch Opportunities for On-the-Job Training
Stretch opportunities are short-term assignments that require skills outside of an employee’s
existing job description. Also sometimes referred to as stretch assignments, these are great
ways for employees to learn and grow on the job. For this method to be successful, employees must be supported by supervisors and given the resources to acquire the specific skills to meet the challenge.
6. Tracking Success for Future Upskilling Sessions
Measuring the outcomes of an upskilling initiative is crucial to its improvement. Itemize skills
taught in the training and create a methodology for evaluating the success of each item.
For example, a training session on a communications platform may show that workers made
noticeable gains in the use of a message sorting feature, but are not maximizing the
functionality of data-sharing tools. Such a tracking system helps employees incorporate
newly-learned skills. It also helps to establish an upskilling program used by other departments or managers within the organization.
Upskilling and reskilling for the digital workplace is quite simply imperative for companies in today’s technology-driven marketplace. You can quickly boost your worker’s output and morale with a well-planned skills training program tailored to your company’s needs.