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Today, upward career mobility is a top priority for modern employees, and upskilling is an excellent way to make it happen. Having a thorough and deliberate upskilling program in your workplace that empowers your employees and elevates their professional worth is crucial in any growing organization.
An ideal upskilling program should be in-depth, objective, and customizable to suit different employees. It should cut across the skill spectrum, focusing on everyday office skills such as communication skills and more niche skills like data interpretation.
Below are 6 steps to create a successful upskilling program for your team.
Identifying specific skills your company needs now and in the future should be your first course of action. First, conduct a detailed skill gap analysis to angle your upskilling program toward satisfying those individual skill requirements. To complete a skill assessment effectively, you should assess both your current and future needs.
To identify your employees’ current skill gaps, do the following:
To identify the future skills your workforce will need, follow these techniques:
Conducting a skill gap analysis enables your upskilling program to better cater to your current and future skill needs. A skills gap analysis also helps you pinpoint which areas to channel more training resources into.
As a manager or business owner, you should know your employees’ short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals. Find out what skills each employee is most interested in learning and how they envision their career progression within your company.
The best way of gathering this information is by creating employee development plans. As the manager, one of your biggest roles is ensuring your employees’ professional goals align with your company’s goals.
Employee development plans give you insight into an employee’s career expectations. This way, you can allocate the right training resources to the right employees. Also, you can give your employees better feedback and empower them to set professional goals with a higher chance of success within your company.
You should approach your upskilling program with a collaborative win-win mindset. With this approach, you should allot sufficient learning time to your employees within work hours.
Creating dedicated learning time allows your employees to fully immerse themselves in upskilling and advance their skills without sacrificing too much of their personal time.
Besides allocating time for upskilling, leverage mobile learning techniques to make upskilling easier and more engaging for your employees. Your business will directly benefit from upskilling once an employee masters a gainful skill and puts it into practice.
Ultimately, learned skills can only be perfected through real-life experiences. Including workplace coaching and mentoring in your upskilling program ensures employees apply their newfound skills successfully.
All too often, learning new skills and applying them to real-world situations comes with a steep learning curve, and employees might make mistakes. In this case, more experienced employees can offer guidance and help newly-trained employees avoid costly mistakes.
Mentored employees have more opportunities to polish their skills, grow their networks, and bring more value to the company. Better yet, you can supplement your in-house mentoring program by leveraging mentoring platforms such as ADPList and Mentoring Complete.
When one team member attends an upskilling program your company has sponsored, the skills acquired should benefit the entire team. As a result, it’s a good idea to set up a post-training engagement where the trained employee shares their newfound knowledge with the rest of the group.
A post-training program ensures you get a good long-term return on investment because it establishes a clear path of knowledge transfer within your company. This way, even if the trained employee gets better job offers and leaves your company, you’ll still benefit from the upskilling investment.
Additionally, a post-training program helps newly-trained employee better comprehend their acquired skills. For instance, if the employee attends a coding boot camp, sharing what they’ve learned with other team members will allow them to practice their coding skills, making them much better coders.
To make knowledge transfer more effective, let the employees attending training know that they’ll be teaching their peers after the training is complete. Encourage them to take notes too. It makes them extra focused and stimulates them to approach the training program with a learner’s and mentor’s mindset.
You might lose your investment in your employees if you don’t support their career advancement. An employee who’s learned new skills but doesn’t have use for them in their current job could be easily poached by your competitors. That’s why you should ensure that upskilled employees receive assignments that allow them to practice and develop their new skills.
For instance, if an IT staffer completed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software training, you can have your CRM manager assign them roles befitting their new skills. The employee could collaborate with your customer service team to help them navigate the technical aspects of CRM tools, like pooling and analyzing customer data while retaining their duties in IT.
You and your employees are after the same thing — progress. You want to grow your business while your employees want career progression.
Because an upskilling program directly benefits you and your workforce, it pays to put extra effort into getting it right. Thankfully, these six tips will help you make the right investment.
Eva Chan is a Career Counselor and Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW) at Resume Genius and has a background in the education management industry. Eva graduated from the University of British Columbia with a bachelor’s degree in English. She’s since coached several professionals in building their resumes and finding fulfilling work.
