What Is Employee Upskilling?
Upskilling is the process of continuously learning new skills and improving your existing skills to keep pace with the rapidly changing world.
In the workforce, upskilling is conducted in companies as a means to improve employees’ skillsets. This would increase employees’ job capabilities while being able to maintain the current workforce without hiring additional workers.
As technology and digitalization continuously change our work processes, businesses are becoming increasingly dependent on digital platforms and applications to streamline and automate business processes.
Upskilling thus allows companies’ workforce to remain relevant and competitive by creating learning opportunities for employees to stay ahead of the industry.
Why Is It So Important For My Business?
As mentioned above, business operations are rapidly changing to accommodate the growth of digitalization and technological developments.
To remain relevant, businesses must either constantly replace their workforce to suit the job requirements needed for their business operations or update their workforce with skills and knowledge that are relevant in the industry.
Having to constantly replace your workforce is unviable.
Not only is it expensive in sourcing qualified talents, but it can also rack up costs from retraining your workforce, not to mention that you are scraping off the work progression made by previous employees.
As such, upskilling plays a vital role in adapting your workforce to current industry trends and preventing your business from racking up costs on human resources.
There are also other major benefits of upskilling such as:
- Increasing your employees’ productivity
- Employees can acquire new skills and knowledge that can be highly beneficial for your business processes
- Able to meet employees’ expectations for growth and opportunities given by your company
- Allows companies to be more competitive by being able to constantly update about industry changes
- Increases employees’ work satisfaction and reduces employee turnover rate
Factors to consider when upskilling my workers
There are various upskilling strategies and methods that you can use in your company. However, managers must firstly be able to determine the strategy that works best for their employees.
Some factors that managers should consider are:
- Employees’ areas of work and roles in the company
- Employees’ goals and objectives
- Current knowledge that employees have
- Current technology/skillset requirements to stay relevant in the industry
- Whether employees have enough time to focus on upskilling
Upskilling can be done via a multitude of methods, such as one-on-one mentorship or group training sessions. However, digital upskilling sessions are increasingly gaining popularity as they offer flexibility in time and personal customization to each employee’s interest.
Upskilling my workers through the use of an LMS
One increasingly popular way of upskilling is through a Learning Management System (LMS). Through an LMS, employers can provide eLearning course(s) to suit their employees’ needs.
Furthermore, employees with time constraints can learn new skills at their own pace and time, making lifelong learning that much more flexible.
Learn more about ACP Computer’s LOOP LMS here!