Upskilling & Reskilling of Employees [All you Need to Know]

“Upskilling and Reskilling is a worthy investment of a company in ‘Future Proofing’ the entire workforce to ensure they are Resilient to the economic rotations and job market upheavals.”

In the ever-changing world of work, companies look forward to building a workforce that is agile and adaptive to the internal/external modifications being demanded. These may include renewing business culture, establishing remote work, global partnerships and ventures, digitization, innovative tech advancements, and many others.

The recent pandemic crisis impacted the labor supply and demand and led enterprises to reshape their methodologies and procedures to be ready for the ‘Future of Work’.

Strengthening the talent management strategies, a high focus shifted towards promoting continuous training, learning, and relearning of the employees, including all the aspects of incorporating Upskilling and Reskilling.

A company’s ability to scale up and expand the skill set of its employees forms the key to drive high performance and significant market growth while offering a quantifiable competitive advantage among the industry niche.

“Technology while creating powerful business opportunities evolves skill gaps alongside.”

Let us look at the definitions of the concepts and then move on to the need and benefits of reskilling and upskilling, eventually.

What is Upskilling?

(skills improvement, increase in skills, additional training)

Upskilling is the process of advancing and leveraging relevant competencies needed to keep up with the pace of ever-growing changes and advancements of today.

What is Reskilling?

(learning new skills, retraining, adapting new competencies)

Reskilling, also referred to as relearning, is the activity of learning new competencies and skills to perform modern functions more satisfactorily.

What is Job Recycling?

Job Recycling is the key in the current job market that is constantly updated and requires more specific skills within an individual that make a difference.

One can say,
Upskilling creates more specialized workers while Reskilling creates more versatile workers, allowing both to acquire a knowledge base to face the modern era transformational challenges and provide more options for action.

Upskilling-Reskilling Business Benefits

“To handle and orchestrate changes within an organization, 68% of business owners have reported investing in Upskilling and Reskilling training programs.”

Reskilling and Upskilling are parts of a business plan that help to encourage innovation and creativity among the workforce and recycle their dexterities to grow them professionally and intellectually.

These practices render mutual benefits at both ends (i.e. to employer as well as employee) that favor maximizing employee potential and efficiencies and employer’s business growth and success.

• Fight against the digital divide from within the company, making it more competitive
• Increase and improve corporate reputation by offering continuous training to the staff
• Reduce the selection processes and consequently the adaptation intervals
• Promote dynamic company culture adapted to a constantly evolving environment
• Help build loyalty and retain talent by broadening their professional profile and favor to best optimize the current sitting talent
• Professionals feel valued by putting the company at their disposal training to grow professionally
• Organizations can go back to scaling their growth seamlessly without any service disruptions after witnessing new business or economic transformations

How Can your Organization Implement Reskilling and Upskilling Plans?

The steps to implement Reskilling and Upskilling strategies within a business combine the following:

• Study the needs of your business to determine what new jobs and skills are useful and significant to the company
• Promote collaborative learnings that allow peer-to-peer education transfer and enable learning to happen in the flow of work
• Run periodic assessments/skill tests of the staff as per the business requirements to identify who needs reskilling or upskilling
• Design a training system to accommodate diverse job profiles that facilitate learning and gaining knowledge via digital software tools and favorable working schedules
• Embrace mobile/remote learning that helps the workforce to rapidly reskill and adapt to the changing organization’s environment
• Conduct an ongoing evaluation to evaluate the level of progress and analyze employee response

[Related read: “Hiring Remote Employees: 3 Tips That Can Help you.”]

Final Consideration

The use of new technologies in a company can be a competitive intelligence advantage, but constant training of the people in charge of using all these new tools, techniques, and methodologies is essential.

In this context of constant volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, companies need continuous adaptation to new realities. Faced with this situation, professionals and companies must reinforce their knowledge and skills so that together they can compete in this changing market.

CodeGlo long initiated the reskilling and upskilling of its employees to close the skill gaps generated while incorporating new technology advancements and to get the entire CodeGlo family ready and resilient to meet future needs.