Training Industry Magazine - May/June 2021 - 33

UPSKILLING TO
THE RESCUE
Organizations can embrace upskilling
and help your organization avoid a
disastrous talent exodus. Upskilling
aligns the skills of your people to your
company's evolving business strategy.
It also boosts their productivity, as 41%
of workers who lack confidence in
their skills feel that tasks take longer
as a result.
You can implement an advanced,
effective and iterative upskilling
strategy in seven steps. Whether
you're just now getting started or your
upskilling efforts are well underway,
you can leverage this seven-step
process to gauge your current strategy
and expand your efforts to create and
capture even more business value.

STEP 1: IDENTIFY FUTURE
SKILLS
What critical skills will your workers
need in the coming years? Answer
this question for your company,
departments and business units, and
individual workers.
First, consider your company's business
strategy and objectives. Identify three
to five skills necessary to achieve your
organization's goals. A company that
needs to improve call center service,
for example, might need enhanced
communication, empathy and data
science skills.
Sometimes it makes sense to start at
the department level, especially if you
work at a large, complex organization.
Your head of sales might say, " Our
department really needs to focus
on negotiations, " so that becomes a
critical skill.
Of course, critical skills for individuals
will vary. Encourage your workers
to own their upskilling and support
them with career conversations. Most
of the time, an individual worker's
aspirations will support organizational
objectives. Encourage this, and
stay open-minded to people trying
new things.

STEP 2: ASSESS SKILLS
This is about establishing a baseline
of current capabilities. It allows you
to measure progress in a meaningful
way and set upskilling goals. When
you're starting your assessment, focus
on the three to five future skills you've
identified as critical.
One way to establish a skills baseline
is to do it manually. You can survey
your people through independent
assessments or 360-degree reviews.
You can also pull data from your human
capital management (HCM) software,
applicant tracking system (ATS), learning
experience platform (LXP) or similar
applications. If they're not integrated,
you'll probably be managing data with
spreadsheets.
A more comprehensive and less laborintensive way to establish your baseline
is to use purpose-built technology that
meets the challenge of fragmented
and ever-evolving data sets. Find a
platform that integrates with your HR
tech, continuously collects skills data
from your workforce and ensures your
people's skills are current.

STEP 3: SET UPSKILLING
GOALS
Add targets to your plan. More
specifically, gather a baseline of existing
skills to help determine how your
organization will go about learning the
future skills it needs to fill gaps. Again,
take into account your organization as a
whole.
Plans, like skills, will vary person to
person. How many skills can people
focus on simultaneously? Encourage
your people to pick one or two based on
their gaps. Any more than that can make
learning unwieldy.

sense for your people. Remember, the
most advanced upskilling strategies
help people build skills through practice,
feedback and reflection. Examples of
learning methods include:
* Online, self-directed. A project manager
watches a once-a-month webinar
series about keeping teams aligned
and practices what she learns with her
teams.
* Team-based learning (virtual or in-person).
A marketing team wants to streamline its
processes, so it participates in a teambased Agile methodology workshop
where it restructures its processes in a
series of virtual learning sessions.
* Peer-to-peer. One customer service
rep finds an online forum that discusses
ways to deal with difficult customers.
Peers then practice, get feedback and
reflect together prior to conversations
with real customers.
* On the job. A retail supervisor asks an
associate to help manage shipping,
sharing increasingly more instructions
and responsibilities over time. This is
real-time, on-the-job learning, so it's
important for the supervisor to provide
feedback throughout the process.
Keep in mind that people learn best
when multiple learning methods are
leveraged and learning is personalized.

Encourage your workers
to own their upskilling
and support them with
career conversations.

STEP 4: MAP LEARNING
TO SKILLS

STEP 5: MEASURE SKILLS
PROGRESS

You've set your upskilling goals. Now
comes some fun - figuring out how
to achieve them. This is about picking
learning methods that make the most

Are your people retaining and using their
new skills? Continually track progress
against a series of key metrics - including
a skills inventory and progression - to

T R A I N I N G I N DUSTR Y MAGAZ INE - CLOSING SKILLS GAPS I WWW. T RAI NINGINDU S T RY . C OM/ MAGAZ I NE

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Training Industry Magazine - May/June 2021

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