For all businesses, being competitive and keeping up with a rapidly evolving marketplace is a major challenge. It is therefore imperative to ensure your employees stay ahead of the curve through upskilling and reskilling. These two aspects are crucial for any company looking to stand out in today’s market.

Upskilling

Upskilling focuses more on the training and education of your current employees to improve their current skillset. Through learning these new skills and improving on their current skills, employees are provided with the knowledge and tools to perform their current job effectively. Benefits of upskilling employees include:

Helping employees to become confident and knowledgeable in their field of expertise.
Assisting employees to perform more effectively in their current roles.
Promoting a culture of adapting to constant changes in the market.
To keep your employees engaged, motivated and capable.

Reskilling

Reskilling is giving employees additional, complementary skills. These skills will enable employees to take on a new role where their current role overlaps with skills required for the new role.

Benefits of reskilling employees include:

Staff retention of high performing individuals within the organisation
Promotes a culture of adapting to constant changes in the market
Keeps your employees engaged, motivated and capable

Current trends show that the way employees work is changing constantly. The most critical factors in today’s trends are linked to employees and the way they perceive their employers. Employees are looking for employers who give them an opportunity to make a meaningful contribution and to evolve in the ever-changing market.

Employers must investigate reskilling and upskilling employees to enable them to apply creativity, critical thinking and digital dexterity which will empower them to solve complex problems.

There are many ways to upskill and reskill employees. It’s important to find the right training for your employees and then implement it successfully. Measuring the success of a new training programme can be tricky, but it’s important to do so to determine whether the programme was successful. Here is a list of ideas for different learning methods:

Online courses
In-house training programmes
On-the-job training
Mentorship programmes
Coaching sessions
Case studies
Group activities

Managing the training process

1. Conduct a skills gap analysis

The skills gap analysis will show the organisation what skills the employees currently have, what skills are required for all the roles within the organisation and through that you determine which employees need to be trained to breach the gap.

2. Create employee development plans

Once the skills gap has been identified for each role, a development plan needs to be compiled. This plan consists of the type of training required, the budget available and the type of service provider required.

Once you’ve chosen the right training programme for your employees, it’s important to implement it successfully. This means making sure the training is accessible and relevant to your employees. It’s also important to set realistic expectations for the new programme and to measure its success over time. This will help you determine whether the programme was successful and whether it should be continued.

3. Measuring the success of the development plan

It is important to measure the success of the development plan. These are aspects to consider when tracking and monitoring the success of a training session:

The number of employees who completed the training
The number of employees who showed improvement after completing the training
The number of employees who were promoted or started a new job after completing the training
The cost of the training vs the benefits gained

With today’s digital economy, information, new ideas and business models that continually expand are standard. It is therefore 0imperative to promote a continuous learning environment withing the organisation. Over and above the fact that upskilling and reskilling benefits any organisation in the long run, helping your employees develop new skills is a selling point for an employer. With the war for talent, it is becoming more important to attract new talent and create engaged employees who feel valued and appreciated.

About Flink
Flink is a unique recruitment platform driven by high-speed quality placements through disruptive innovation. We are committed to becoming change leaders and revolutionising traditional recruitment by creating the ultimate automated recruitment platform.