Upskilling in 2021

Upskilling has become increasingly relevant over the past years. There are several reasons for this; the most important is the growing digital skills gap many companies face.

Upskilling is the process of acquiring new and relevant competencies needed today and within the near future. Most common samples of upskilling efforts include digital skills, analytics skills, and organizational transformation skills.

The causes of the present skills gap are due to an aging workforce and/or digitalization.

Upskilling is crucial to thriving in marketplace nowadays. Do your employees have these most in-demand skills for the years ahead?

There are various ways to upskill your workforce. Based on your organizational needs, one method is more suitable than another. Sometimes, a mix of several upskilling techniques are going to be what works best:

 

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  Job Rotation:

  
  

It is the practice of moving employees between jobs in a corporation, which may be a superb way to transfer specific skills, knowledge, and competencies. They may be temporary, so employees tend to go back to their original job after a particular period.

 

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  Learning and Development:

  
  

The most obvious way of upskilling your workforce is also by choosing a learning and development program following a particular strategy, starting by analyzing its training needs, specifying its objectives, designing training content and method, to finally monitoring and evaluating the results.

Some companies prefer online courses together with reality lectures and seminars, while others will go for coaching and track their teams upskilling on their learning management system.

 

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  Outsourcing:

  
  

Sometimes, you wish to upskill people but you don’t have the inner capacity to try and do so. It is either because you would like employees with specific skills the soonest possible and training them would take too long, or perhaps because the talents you need are so new that you don’t have the knowledge and experience to start upskilling people.

As a solution, it would to be hire freelance specialists or contract-based employees. By teaming these external experts up with the correct people from within the company, you create an upskilling opportunity and you bring the exact skills, competencies, and experience you would like to get started on any new project.

 

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  Digital upskilling:

  
  

Over the past few years, technology has drastically changed the way businesses operate and the way people learn will become increasingly important over the following few years. That’s why being digitally fluent has officially become a requirement for each professional.

Consequently, as companies continue to adopt digital technology to transform services or businesses, employees are expected to possess a decent understanding of the tech tools given to them and operate effectively in an increasingly digital world. This includes everything from understanding a way to use the Microsoft Office suite, to advanced artificial intelligence, blind typing to basic programming.

 

Learning new skills encompasses a way of opening up new doors, even ones that you didn’t see coming. In the journey to upskilling your people, or even just yourself, it’s important to notice that the abilities you ought to have are the correct ones that may help drive innovation and growth, and your workforce is certain to succeed and bring value to the company in 2021 and beyond.