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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nYou may have employees who have been with your organization for decades. They have a record of accomplishment, are well liked, and a great value to the company. The problem is your workforce needs are shifting. To stay employed by your company, these valued employees will need to learn a skill set for a new job, or they will have to boost their capabilities to stay in the job they already have. In other words, they will have to be “reskilled” to do a different job or “upskilled” to do their current job in a different way.<\/p>\n
Reskilling and upskilling employees is widely recognized as one of the great challenges facing companies today, particularly in this Digital Age. “As jobs are transformed by the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we need to reskill more than 1 billion people by 2030,” a recent World Economic Forum report proclaims. “In the next two years—by 2022—42 percent of core skills required to perform existing jobs are expected to change.” Specialized skill sets are increasingly important, the report notes. “There’s a common misconception that we’ll all need to develop highly technological or scientific skills to succeed. Yet while it will be necessary for people to work with technology, we’re also seeing a growing need for people to develop specialized skills for how they interact with each other. These include creativity, collaboration, and interpersonal dynamics, as well as skills related to specialized sales, Human Resources, care and education roles.”<\/p>\n
What’s the best way to approach reskilling and upskilling a workforce? Several Training Top 125 winners and other companies, plus a few experts, offer their insights and best practices.<\/p>\n
Personalized Learning Paths<\/strong><\/p>\n At Training Top 125er Applied Materials, Inc., employees help managers determine the best ways for them to stay valuable to the company while fulfilling their own career goals. “Companywide initiative Appliedx PATHWAY allows our employees to plot personalized learning plans that link learning initiatives for each business group. The program provides specialized skills training based on job role and career categories,” says Director of Performance Improvement & Training Chuck Tully. “Those who enroll can select either their current job role (to increase in-role skills) or other job roles (to increase skills in preparation of a job-role transfer). Such courses include technical engineering, tool and service development, professional skills, as well as basic, intermediary, and advanced managerial development.”<\/p>\n Experts at Applied Materials develop the curriculum, and employees extend their training based on job-role recommendations. Employees determine the developmental path with their manager, providing opportunities to learn skills for their role and for career advancement. In addition to the internally developed curriculum, courses from Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, Get Abstract, Skillsoft, and more are available to further round out employees’ capabilities and spark new learning directions, Tully explains.<\/p>\n Once a development pathway is chosen, 20 to 30-plus hours of “expert-defined” coursework is assigned according to the employee’s job role. The employee selects additional enrichment training to bring the pathway to at least 40 hours for the year.<\/p>\n Tully says the personalized learning paths emphasize a culture of continuous growth. “With our employee-centric approach, we are generating a culture of lifelong learning. Our employee growth sustains our position as the global leader in materials engineering solutions, allowing our customers to transform their possibilities into reality.”<\/p>\n Job-Specific Competency Models<\/strong><\/p>\n Training Top 125er ArcBest has carefully mapped out competencies for each job, according to Director of Learning Development David Kessler. “In the last two years, we have implemented job-specific competency models for every role in our organization,” Kessler says. “We partnered with IBM Watson Talent Frameworks to map our jobs to their job library, then worked with employees from each team to organize each job into an ArcBest job family and customize each job. Through this process, we have defined the critical skills for every role in our organization.”<\/p>\n The clearly defined requirements of each job allow managers to more effectively coach employees to attain the skills needed to achieve their career goals. “All of the competencies are defined, by proficiency level, into behavior statements. The proficiency levels help to define the career path within a job family and beyond,” Kessler explains. “The detailed behavior statements provide leaders with robust language for articulating skill gaps and development tips for those skills. These development tips, and associated training recommendations, can be easily added to each employee’s individual development plan.”<\/p>\n Job Shadowing for New Roles<\/strong><\/p>\n At Training Top 125er AAA Northeast, job shadowing provides a way for employees to preview new career opportunities, and possibly move into those new roles, says Director of Employee Learning and Development, Human Resources, Keri Borba. “We have a job-shadow program whereby employees interested in different roles can shadow an experienced incumbent and learn more about the skills and abilities needed,” she relates. “The shadow program includes conversation with the seeker’s current manager, the HR business partner, and a hiring manager from the role the seeker is interested in. We also offer Career Exploration Workshops, which include discussion about skills and knowledge areas needed, and provide a look at ‘a day in the life.’”<\/p>\n Employees who are not interested in reskilling for a new job can easily tap resources to upskill in their current role. “We have a wide breadth of personal and professional development courses that are open to all employees to help them build skills to be even more effective in their current role. The classes offered range from technical training in Office 365 to courses focused on decision-making and breakthrough thinking,” Borba says. “Every course offered has a self-assessment or reflective exercise to encourage participants to think about their current day-to-day actions and responsibilities and consider how the skills or knowledge they just explored will help them to be more successful in their current role.”<\/p>\n Technology Skills Upgrade<\/strong><\/p>\n The greatest impetus for employees to enhance skills or learn new ones often is technology. With the rapid pace of technological advancement in recent years, some employees and companies are turning to outside training providers for help. One such provider is Zip Code Wilmington, a nonprofit coding school in Wilmington, DE, that matches companies with trained, qualified, and diverse talent. These services are designed to enable corporate partners to remain competitive employers within the technology sector. “In recent years, Zip Code Wilmington has experienced a rise in the number of corporate partners who want to upskill their technology workforce,” says Executive Director Desa Burton. “These individuals go through the same application and interview process as other candidates to ensure they are the right fit for our immersive 12-week cohort experience. We’re seeing more and more companies that want to recruit, upskill, or reskill tech talent through Zip Code Wilmington. These are companies in the Delaware tech community, which comprises several large companies, including M&T Bank, CSC, and Marlette Funding, among others.”<\/p>\n Burton says it is worth it for a company to reskill or upskill an existing employee rather than look for a new one. “Current employees already know the corporate culture and values, procedures, goals, and strategy, so they are better able to quickly adapt and add value in a new tech role much faster, and to a greater extent, than a new employee,” she says. “Also, the cost associated with upskilling or reskilling an employee is many factors less than what it would take to bring on a new employee, which typically requires extensive onboarding costs, as well as months to a year of time on the job to adjust to the new environment.”<\/p>\n CSC, a leading provider of business, legal, tax, and digital brand services to companies around the globe, is one of the many companies that has worked with Zip Code Wilmington to update and enhance its employees’ skill sets. “One program we’re particularly excited about is our Pathways program,” says CSC Global Talent Management Leader Laura Gleason. “This program provides training opportunities for upskilling or reskilling employees to meet specific business needs. These programs, like Zip Code Wilmington, are a win-win. CSC retains critical business know-how and talented employees, while providing employees the opportunity to develop their career.”<\/p>\n CSC recently launched a Pathways program in partnership with Zip Code Wilmington, which offers a 12-week, full-time, intensive coding boot camp designed to teach participants about Java software development and better prepare them for a career in technology. “At the successful conclusion of the program, the employees will be placed in new technology roles at CSC,” Gleason says. “This Pathways program has opened the door to a new career path for our employees, and secured the needed technology talent to drive our business forward.”<\/p>\n Upskilling to Attain Better People Skills<\/strong><\/p>\n It is common to think of reskilling or upskilling only as it pertains to technology, but some companies are finding the need for employees at all levels who are better equipped for frequent human interaction. “The need for these kinds of people skills exists at all levels, including individual contributor roles such as sales, customer service, nurses, insurance adjustors, and even on the factory floor,” says Bill Benjamin, partner, The Institute for Health and Human Potential (IHHP). “We’ve seen an increase in the number of hospitals and medical practices upskilling their physicians with people skills,” he says. “There are very few roles in organizations that don’t require the need to collaborate, innovate, and interact with others in order to be successful. In fact, with advances in technology, those are the roles that are left for humans.”<\/p>\n That is exactly what Katie McAllister, AVP, Talent and Leadership Development at CNA Insurance, an IHHP client, is finding. “In our current climate of rapid change and disruption, there is a lot of emphasis on upskilling and reskilling around technical skills. At CNA, we’re also thinking about how the role of a people leader is evolving as a result of digitization and changing employee needs and expectations. We’re working to upskill our people leaders to help them evolve at the right pace.”<\/p>\n