Why Upskilling is a Big Issue and How to Overcome It!
Level Up or Fade Away!
This seems to be the digital revolution’s central message.
Whether we like it or not, the changing skills landscape was well underway before COVID.
According to the World Economic Forum, COVID only helped turbocharge the future of work by accelerating digitization (84%) and automation (50%) and forcing organizations to embrace remote work (83%).
So, it is no surprise that the skills gap is widening. A report by Korn Ferry predicts that more than 85 million jobs will be empty by 2030 due to the lack of qualified candidates. As per Werner Penk, president of Korn Ferry’s Global Technology Market practice, much of the duty falls on companies and governments; companies have to train their employees, and governments have to rethink their education programs to align with today’s requirements.
But… What exactly is a skills gap? What are the most in-demand hard and soft skills? And what are the most significant challenges companies face when Upskilling and reskilling their workforce? These as well as their plausible solutions will be discussed below.
· What is a Skills Gap?
∘ What Specific Areas Need to be Filled?
∘ The 5 Most In-Demand Fields Globally & The Hardest Jobs to Fill
· Challenges Companies Face When Reskilling/Upskilling Their Workforce
∘ Lack of Resources
∘ Identifying & Comprehending the Skills Gap Adequately
∘ Employee Training Challenges
· What It Takes to Successfully close the Skills Gap!
∘ 1. Conduct a Skills Gap Analysis
∘ 2. Look into Your Hiring Process!
∘ 3. Foster a Learning Environment
∘ Reskill your Nontechnical Employees Too!
∘ Real-Life Upskilling Examples
· Final Words
What is a Skills Gap?
A skills gap is the difference between the skills that companies require and those that are present in today’s workforce.
It becomes problematic when the organization cannot find the required skills in its internal staff, nor can it find them in the external labor market. This poses a change management dilemma which if not properly dealt with can lead to serious organizational problems down the road.
What Specific Areas Need to be Filled?
According to McKinsey, 87% of surveyed companies experienced skill gaps, and the business areas with the greatest need to address skill gaps were:
As per other sources, like Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, and Kris Lande, Senior Vice President at Salesforce, each job role requires different skills; however, the ones that are important for every job are teamwork, communication, data, and analysis.
Furthermore, Mckinsey identified 4000 tech skills and grouped them under seven in-demand areas: DevOps, customer experience, cloud, automation, platforms and products, data management, and cybersecurity. The skill gaps in these seven areas are already sizable and growing.
Skill gaps are expected in functions that have already started implementing automation and AI technology.
The 5 Most In-Demand Fields Globally & The Hardest Jobs to Fill
The five fields that are most in-demand globally are:
IT & data, operations & logistics, manufacturing & production, front-office & customer-facing jobs.
Additionally, the hardest jobs to fill were front-line ones, also jobs that didn’t offer high income related to tech like government jobs, education, health, banking & finance, etc…
In simple terms, the most in-demand skills (as per Betterup & Softskills) can be summed up as follows:
Challenges Companies Face When Reskilling/Upskilling Their Workforce
Even though upskilling initiatives have grown, the main challenges are:
Lack of Resources
Lack of time, budget, content, in-depth topic offerings, and leadership support rank high on the challenge list. In short, the struggle between completing the workload and enhancing employees’ skills never ends.
Additionally, coming up with the required funds may be quite an issue. According to a 2019 report by WEF and the Boston Consulting Group, organizations must spend around $24,800 on upskilling and reskilling activities, including sponsoring educational resources and subject matter expertise training for staff members.
Identifying & Comprehending the Skills Gap Adequately
What works for one company doesn’t work for another. Hence before beginning the process of upskilling, organizations should conduct a Skills gap analysis: assess what their employees need, & when they should upskill. When should they re-skill? What mix of technical vs non-technical capabilities do they have, and which skills should be developed for maximum productivity?
After all, upskilling is different than reskilling.
Upskilling aims at teaching an employee relevant up-to-date skills that make them better equipped for the job, while reskilling aims at teaching an employee a completely new skill set.
For example, non-tech employees may need to be reskilled to occupy new positions, whereas technical talent may need more upskilling. Again, it depends, but here lack of resources is the most common issue.
When bringing on non-tech talent, a good amount of time needs to be allocated in bringing new employees up to speed gradually, which means hours and hours may need to be spent with them —
Abhishek Sharma, co-founder & COO of Fashinza:
Employee Training Challenges
Employee training challenges companies face involve:
- Reboarding Existing Employees & Making Sure They Are Engaged
Onboarding is not only for new employees. Old Existing employees need onboarding too especially when they shift laterally into new roles. If old, they may need convincing regarding why they should reskill or upskill. They may be used to their company’s culture, but their new team culture may be different, or maybe the technology they have to use is different. Additionally, adapting to remote work and new enterprise software may be an issue. remote work There is a multitude of reasons; that’s why it’s important to communicate clear expectations, involve employees, and invest in onboarding as a strategic growth area.
There are two challenges here. One lies in convincing older IT workers that upskilling is worth it, and the other lies in convincing companies of the importance of upskilling their older workers instead of hiring younger, cheaper ones. After all, older workers have soft skills that younger ones don’t — Amruth Laxman, the founding partner at 4Voice
- Learning when to upskill, reskill and scale
When you have one person to train and help, it is fine. But if you have numerous people, each comes from a different background with a different level of skill. So, when attempting to upskill more than one team member, you end up having to homogenize the process, which can eat up valuable resources. Another challenge comes into play concerning managing the process. Often you need to assign someone technically sound to the process of assisting those less skilled, which pulls that individual away from valuable projects — Art Shaikh, the founder of CircleIt
- Tackling outdated boring training methods that have no adequate feedback loop or measure for impact
The issue with traditional training methods is that they treat all learners as one size fits all. The “presentation with no interaction style” can be quite disengaging for a lot of people; it can also lead to information overload with little practical application.
Not to mention this training comes in the form of standardized curriculum-based packages which provide little variance, and are hard to adjust to the work situation at hand.
As a result, many employees believe this training wastes time, and has little to no ROI; most are also overwhelmed by the information overload.
- Adapting to a Remote/Hybrid Workforce
This could pose integration issues since it makes it harder for employees to integrate themselves into the company’s culture and blurs the boundary between work and home, makes it harder to form personal interactions, and puts a lot of employees at risk of feeling isolated. Moreover, scheduling for a huge number of employees as well as catering to different learning styles, and keeping employees engaged adds to this hurdle.
What It Takes to Successfully close the Skills Gap!
It takes a well-developed upskilling strategy that starts conducting a skills gap analysis.
1. Conduct a Skills Gap Analysis
According to AIHR, the skills gap analysis consists of three steps:
Scope & Diagnostics which involves:
- identifying the required skills by revisiting your company’s mission, its business goals, and the critical skills needed to perform the mission.
- Predicting the roles that may be partially or completely automated, the skills that are on the rise, and the job roles your company will need.
Data collection and analysis which involves:
- identifying and conducting an inventory of employees’ skills, identifying the skills needed, and devising job profiles for these skills.
Designing interventions that involve:
- Designing well-thought-out initiatives that are tailored to your company’s needs like targeted learning & development programs, job rotation, job enrichment, peer coaching and mentoring, involving external experts, etc…
2. Look into Your Hiring Process!
- For Tech Talent
As per Mckinsey, make sure to involve tech talent when hiring for other tech talents because techies like to talk to other techies. Also, look for quality rather than quantity; pick flexible learners and self-initiators.
I simply expect that an individual has some self-initiated project experience. When I first began my software development company, I expected a high standard of experience in using the tools of the trade, such as Apache Hadoop, spark, c++, Amazon Web services, redshift, etc… The challenge is, in fact, that not all of this will be seen often, unfortunately. The talent gap is REAL. So, I am hyper-focused on an individuals’ communication skills, presentation skills, and self-initiated experience. If they have a good understanding of distributed systems and knowledge of algorithms and data structures — that’s a bonus in my eyes — Dan Prince, CEO & Founder of IllumiSoft
- For Nontech Talent
It truly comes down to intention. If you’re choosing to scout talent outside the tech pool, then looking at a baby-step approach to onboard outside talent can be helpful. Transition nontech workers in by getting them acclimated through working in non-heavy technical roles.
For example, product management is one such role where one can work closely with engineers without any technical knowledge as well. Assessing a candidate’s potential to take on technical roles in the future, if that’s what will be needed, in addition to evaluating their human/general business skills, is equally important — Abhishek Sharma, Co-founder & COO of Fashinza:
3. Foster a Learning Environment
Instill a culture of learning in your company by creating and tailoring employees’ learning journeys.
- Set Career Development Plans
Career development plans put your employees in the driver’s seat of their growth, and ensure employee buy-in and resource alignment. This will help you overcome the challenges involved in long-term resource alignment.
- Ensure Leadership Buy In
Buy-in from the top is essential to the success of tech implementation. When the organization’s leaders are committed to using the new tech, it will naturally lead to all employees being more invested in learning the latest technology — Mary Guirovich, Career strategist
- Focus on Job Centric Upskilling
Last but not least, make sure your upskilling training is job centric. As per Deloitte, job centric upskilling differs from traditional upskilling in that its main aim is for employees to thrive not merely learn a set of general skills and graduate. It involves training, supporting, and monitoring the employee’s progress throughout.
Its key advantage lies in its ability to be properly aligned to your company’s objective, tailored, and monitored for each employee.
It can help reskill pandemic-displaced workers, current workers, and nontraditional disadvantaged workers. For instance, Sweden has used this model to assign laid-off workers from the airline industry to the understaffed healthcare industry. Amazon has also used this model to transition 300,000 employees into technical areas like cloud computing, and machine learning.
- Offer Different Learning Formats
Everyone learns differently, so be prepared to teach the new employees in various ways, including visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and reading/writing. Having scheduled checkpoints for people to show their mastery will encourage them not to put off the training, Mary Guirovich
Offer roundtable discussions, lateral training, peer-to-peer mentoring, and bite-sized micro-content and quizzes that run for short time intervals to increase engagement. Partner with MOOCs like Coursera Career Academy, Udemy, Pluralsight, etc…
Incorporate different training modules (some are offered via Google or LinkedIn) that can assist your team with upskilling. LinkedIn even offers progress tracking so you can more easily monitor the pace at which your team is moving with the learning, Art Shaikh, Founder & CEO at CircleIt
Reskill your Nontechnical Employees Too!
Tech employers often assume that nontechnical employees cannot be re-skilled. However, research by Mckinsey shows that even people with low skills adjacency can also be reskilled.
How to Re-skill Nontechnical Talent
When it comes to reskilling non-tech talent, Schneider, head of development skills at Pluralsight recommends three steps. First, start with the end in mind. Second pick who you will select based on their interests and strengths. Third, identify and engage champions, i.e., people who are passionate about their reskilling journey.
Real-Life Upskilling Examples
- CircleIt, a company that helps you send cards and gifts to loved ones for any future date or life milestone, has processes to help team members learn and sharpen skills quickly.
The senior members take newer team members under their wing and work with them to achieve results. This has proven effective in UI/UX and marketing in particular —
Art Shaikh, CircleIt’s CEO & founder.
- Savimbo, a B.Corp that creates, certifies, and sells fair-trade carbon credits from the Colombian Amazon, upskills indigenous subsistence farmers around the world to use drones, machine learning apps, GPS, and blockchain to track their carbon offsets so they can sell directly to multinational corporate entities.
I strongly believe, and have the business model to show that there is NO talent gap, merely a training and opportunity gap. I passionately believe that all humans are created equal. When we understand how to unlock the creative potential and energy of all humans, technology does not present a barrier, but an opportunity to resolve inequities —
Drea Burbank, MD
CEO at Savimbo
Final Words
Given that career development is one of the main reasons employees stay in a company, offering upskilling and reskilling opportunities is no longer an option.
That’s why it’s important to remember these famous words when embarking on your upskilling journey:
KNOWLEDGE IS LIVE, LEARN, TRAIN, UPGRADE, RESKILL AND UPSKILL
Sachin Ramdas Bharatiya
