Technology is changing quickly, and it’s taking some jobs away and creating new ones. But employers can’t always wait on new cohorts of applicants who are already trained in these new areas. Even if educational programs [1] could keep up, the skills your employees need will continue to evolve each year, and the skills of existing employees who have already completed their education will need to keep up.

The implication of all this change is that employees and applicants may have skill sets that are no longer in alignment with business needs. The organization may be facing a skills shortage and may find itself unable to fill figure 1 shown below open positions because there are not enough candidates with the required skills.

Figure1: Reskilling Human Workforce

Reskilling could be helpful to an organization for an array of different reasons. Perhaps your business needs to quickly change their offering to adapt to changing economic situations and demand. Or maybe your service or product offering remains the same, but you need to reskill your older employees on key parts of their ever-evolving role.

Gone are the days where digital literacy only applied to the IT department. These days, staff across organizations need to be up to date with the latest software and applications in order to do their job effectively and efficiently.

Even if you’re not focusing on adding to your employees set of hard skills (which you really should), focusing on their soft skills is equally important. Organizations are increasingly reliant on automation and algorithms and key [2] employee skills such as communication, networking, critical thinking and problem-solving can take a hit. Neglecting interpersonal skills and analytical capabilities when it comes to your workforce isn’t a good long-term strategy.

Reskilling your workforce can be a cost-effective way to remain competitive in your industry and to provide your employees with continuous learning and development opportunities to increase employee retention. With ever-changing industry requirements, technology improvements and on top of that a global pandemic, this might just be the time to look into reskilling all or some of your employees.

Running a skill set analysis either at an organizational/departmental or individual level will help to crystallize what skills are currently within your organization and what skills are needed to reach business goals in the future. Even if adding to your employees’ hard skills isn’t your focus, improving on their soft skills is equally important. Key soft skills such as communication, networking, critical thinking and problem-solving are more overlooked and neglected as organizations become increasingly reliant on automation and algorithms.

• Enhance the general adaptability of your workforce [3].
• Improve prevalence and talent pools of future critical skills.
• Redesign focus roles.
• Identify your future skills pay gap.
• Conduct a benchmarking exercise.

Reskilling likewise enables an employer to get more value out of their existing workforce by taking a more horizontal and holistic approach. In a reskilling initiative, workers receive new training, experience, and certifications that allow them to move between different roles within an organization [4]. The goal is to instill a more universal skill set across your workforce, moving your employees' skill sets out of their silos and creating a more universal and interchangeable base of workers.

References:

1. https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2018/07/16/what-is-reskilling/#:~:text=Reskilling%20can%20be%20undertaken%20by%20employers%20by%20launching,training%20 programs%20for%20employees%20to%20close%20the%20gaps.
2. https://www.goskills.com/Resources/Reskilling
3. https://humancapital.aon.com/insights/articles/2021/a-future-ready-workforce-requires-reskilling-and-upskilling-talent-here-are-five-actions-to-get-started
4. https://www.ascentis.com/blog/reskilling-upskilling-and-retaining-talent-in-the-workforce/

Cite this article:

S. Nandhinidwaraka (2021) Reskilling Human Workforce, Anatechmaz, pp. 22