How Upskilling Your Team Benefits Your Organization?

Smart organizations can alleviate some of their basic financial pains by investing in tenured employees to retain them in the organization. Stellar employees, the ones with great morale and high productivity, can be hard to come by and organizations understand the benefits of finding ways to retain these individuals. To create a better workforce companies are exploring the question – How upskilling your team benefits your organization?

Numerous successful companies invest in upskilling to help retain current employees and brush up their skills for the greater benefit of the organisation.

What is Upskilling?

Upskilling is the process of teaching current employees new skills. This enables the employees to move into bigger and better jobs in the organization.

Investing in upskilling employees pays off in the long run, as the company saves money on hiring new associates and boosts the morale of tenured employees at the same time.

How Does Upskilling Benefit Your Organisation?

It may seem like a good idea to train your people and help them move up the corporate ladder, but it’s more than a noble concept.

There are specific benefits you will reap from upskilling the workforce:

Employee Retention

Employees who are challenged to develop and grow are often the happiest ones at an organization. If your company works to retain tenured employees, it will prove that you are making a solid investment in the people, which is sure to boost morale and productivity. Employees who are challenged to grow outside of their roles tend to get excited about what might be around the corner for them.

You may also like to read : Reasons to Invest in Employee Management System

Customer Satisfaction

If you have happy employees, you are far more likely to have happy customers. Content employees are typically more invested in the company, they promote the corporate brand within the organization and to your customers. Typically, happy customers tend to be loyal customers as well.

Save on the process of rehiring 

It is expensive to lose and replace tenured associates. You are losing the investment you made in the current individual, not just because of any talent development you paid for, but also because when that individual leaves, they take all their knowledge and experience with them.

Now you have to pay not only to advertise the new role, for the recruitment process, the time it takes to interview candidates, any hiring bonuses that new individuals may require and also the time it will take the new individual to ramp up into the new position. Simply losing one employee can be a hit on the bottom line.

Upskilling Strategies

In order to create robust upskilling in your organization, you will need to devise a strategic plan. Having a strategy will help you to get buy-in from leadership within the organization and also from the employees themselves.

Personal Development Plans

Encourage associates to build a Personal Development Plan that includes competencies that they want to improve upon and skills they want to gain. Empowering your employees to come up with their own plan is key to the success of the upskilling training program. Employees can identify new skills and competencies that resonate with them as opposed to being told what they need to learn.

Allocate Time During the Workday

Once your employees create their individual development plan, allow time during the workday for employees to upskill. Perhaps you have an employee who wants to take a communications course. Allow them to leave early to attend class or provide time and a quiet space to take the class online.

Job-Specific Upskilling/Credentialing Programs

Offer your employees job-specific training to enhance their current skills. For example, you may have specialty software used by only a small sector of your organization. Consider offering upskilling training on the software to employees in the company who may be interested in learning more about it. You may also consider offering credentialing programs, meaning training that results in a professional certificate.

For example, you may have instructional designers on your team who would benefit by enrolling in an intensive E-Learning Certificate program.

You may be looking at the expense of upskilling training and decide it isn’t worth the investment. But it doesn’t have to cause a tremendous financial setback. You can upskill employees on a shoestring budget if you get creative. There are many ways to reskill corporate learners using a classroom setting, online learning content, or using your current employees to assist in creating upskilling training.

How to Implement Upskilling Training?

Classroom Training

Trainers can conduct upskilling classes in a classroom setting, allowing employees to learn new skills or enhance current ones. For example, companies may detect downward trends in production and leverage the training department to upskill employees in a group setting, thus correcting bad habits and enhancing production.

Trainers can present new ideas, allow participants to brainstorm and share ideas, utilize training software and bring trainees up to speed quickly.

Virtual Classroom Training

Companies with a global workforce may not have the luxury of classroom training if employees are dispersed in various locations. If your company has numerous locations, consider investing in a Learning and Talent Development platform to function as a virtual classroom solution.

Investing in virtual classroom programs allows you to upskill employees regardless of their location. Employees simply log in to the platform at the designated time and the facilitator can cover an abundance of upskilling training topics.

Microlearning

Another effective way of upskilling employees is to create web-based micro-learning units, short web-based training modules that cover a topic in 5-10 minutes.

For example, an organization may notice a decrease in customer satisfaction surveys. The training team could be leveraged to create a soft skills micro-learning program that covers how to positively interact with customers. Employees could enhance their skills during short workday breaks by taking the micro-learning units that interest them.

Mentors / Subject Matter Experts

Utilize some of your best employees in a mentorship or SME program. Offer your top producers an opportunity to develop their own leadership skills by mentoring others or acting as SMEs in training. Experts are extremely useful in all kinds of training programs, as they can answer questions and explain difficult processes from a practical perspective.

You can also utilize SMEs to assist with building E-Learning content for full micro-learning programs. Your training team will have a peace of mind, knowing that their content is up-to-date and accurate, if they collaborate with SMEs during the development process.

Conclusion

Upskilling has an abundance of advantages, from improving employee motivation to saving the company money. And it doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Begin by assessing gaps in your current employees’ knowledge.

So to finally answer the question – How upskilling your team benefits your organization?

It empowers your employees to develop their own career development path and ultimately offer their skills and expertise to help the company achieve its goals. Take the time to invest in upskilling employees so that they stay with you and help your organization to grow and thrive.