For those in leadership and management positions, it can sometimes be difficult to provide all of your employees with opportunities to grow. Thankfully, a new, innovative, and beneficial trend called upskilling has been gaining steam in organizations spanning various industries.
Upskilling can be described as the act of creating opportunities for employees to learn new skills and abilities, which makes them more well-rounded professionals and more valuable to their organization. Upskilling employees benefits companies in a myriad of ways, ranging from decreasing employee turnover to creating a more robust group of professionals.
By developing upskilling opportunities for your employees, you have the power to aid your employees in reaching their true potential and growing into more valuable employees.
Unfortunately, it can sometimes be tricky to know where to start once you’ve decided to start developing these unique opportunities. Thankfully, having some guidance around the process can make creating upskilling opportunities easier and more accessible.
Here is how to develop upskilling opportunities for employees.
Research In-Demand and Valuable Skills
Before you get the ball rolling and start implementing upskilling opportunities for your employees, it’s important to pinpoint which skills you plan on teaching them. To decide which worthwhile skills you should be teaching your employees, it’s important to do some research and find which skills make sense for you to implement into your processes.
The types of skills that you decide to teach your employees will vary depending on your industry. While it can be useful to branch out and choose skills that aren’t overwhelmingly common in your industry, it can also be helpful to pinpoint which skills can help your employees thrive in their roles.
Given the increasingly digital nature of the world today, many organizations are currently tailoring their upskilling efforts to teach their employees skills that involve digital processes. Some of these skills include coding, graphic design, and social media management. Other valuable skills found in upskilling opportunities include top management skills employees need to advance as business leaders.
While you can incorporate these skills into your upskilling efforts, these are simply examples to help you get closer to pinpointing which skills are right for your organization to choose for its own unique processes.
Decide How You Will Implement Your Upskilling Opportunities
Much like there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to choosing skills to teach your employees, how you go about teaching them these skills can vary widely as well. It’s important to decide how much your organization is willing to invest in upskilling opportunities along with who will be in charge of these efforts.
One key question you’ll need to answer is when are employees getting the opportunities to develop these skills. Will you require them to learn these skills outside of work or during work hours? In addition, it’s important to distinguish the pace and duration of these specific opportunities. You may send the executive team to a networking event or you may take a couple of hours one day week to focus on upskilling opportunities.
Another facet of upskilling you’ll need to determine is who will do the teaching. You may utilize pre-recorded lectures or you may higher a professional with specialized knowledge to conduct classes. While the number of choices at this part of the process may seem overwhelming, it’s actually a great opportunity for you to craft upskilling opportunities that meet your organization’s needs.
This stage of the process allows you to make your upskilling practices a reflection of your company’s culture and goals.
Communicate With Employees Regularly
While you may have a clear vision of the goals you and your organization hope to achieve as a result of upskilling opportunities, your employees may not. Accordingly, it’s important to clearly communicate with your employees about the process of upskilling, how it benefits them, and what you hope to achieve as a result of implementing it.
Employee feedback can also be an extremely valuable resource when it comes to perfecting your upskilling opportunities in your organization. The opinions of your employees may point out ways that you can improve your efforts that you may not have otherwise noticed. In addition, they can provide you with insights into the skills that they are eager to learn and develop.
Given the importance of getting everyone on the same page, you can make your efforts more effective by opening up room for suggestions during both the time you’re developing upskilling opportunities as well as during. This will ensure that you’re creating and maintaining a system that benefits employees in the best possible ways while also addressing problems with your efforts before they become too severe.
Help Your Employees Grow Into High-Quality Professionals
In today’s constantly evolving world, different skills are becoming more important as industries go through constant changes. As someone in a leadership position, you have the power to bolster the effectiveness of your employees by providing them with upskilling opportunities to grow as professionals. If you research in-demand and valuable skills, decide how you will implement upskilling opportunities and regularly communicate this with your employees. This will enable you to greatly increase the amount of trust your employees will have in you and your organization. Though it is not a common practice in every organization yet, it is more than likely that upskilling will become a normalized part in most organizations in the near future.
By imbuing your staff with more skills, you can create a more robust workforce while also strengthening your organization and its ability to reach its full potential.
