If you aren’t making progress in your business, you’re making a step backward. This is especially relevant as companies contemplate their staffing and re-skilling strategies.
In order to stay competitive, businesses must evaluate how much they are spending to retrain their staff. But in order to maximize the return on this investment, firms must involve their workforces as active participants in the process of skill development and upgrading.
McKinsey predicts that as artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and other technologies advance, 14% of the global workforce will be made to find new employment in the near future. Workforces need to be flexible as the economy responds to innovation and market factors. The ideal solution to this problem is to treat employees as active participants in their own professional growth since this will result in a greater emphasis on training and development.
Adapting to New Work Demands
Job-related competencies evolve over time. Whether it’s due to technological advancements or shifts in the labor market, jobs tend to evolve with time, and their descriptions can, too.
As stated in the same survey by Gartner, employers are looking for candidates with 10% more experience than they did a year ago. Many once-desirable skills have become obsolete due to technological advancements, thus today’s companies want candidates with a very different set of abilities than they did even only a decade ago. In cases like these, it can be quite helpful to reskill labor groups.
Disparities in Talent and Skill Sets Widen
There are skill and competence gaps not just in newly posted jobs. Workers throughout the epidemic had to pick up new abilities as they went along. The degree to which the different teams conquered this obstacle varied widely. The continued rise of AI and other forms of technological advancement makes it more important than ever to prepare your personnel to take on expanded duties without diluting your company’s key strengths.
Think about the trend toward a distance-based economic model. At present, the majority of businesses do some or all of their operations online. The number of people using telehealth services is now 38 times more than it was before the pandemic. Those numbers appear to be leveling off. The shift to providing services digitally will necessitate new abilities on the part of staff members. Companies are experiencing significant knowledge gaps because of this mismatch. Eighty-seven percent of CEOs, as reported by McKinsey, have identified talent gaps among their staff. Management teams often find themselves in the position of retraining employees so that they can better serve the firm.
Due to these seismic changes in the market, 59% of L&D experts have ranked workforce up-skilling and re-skilling as their top priorities for the coming year. If you want to make sure your staff has the skills it needs to remain competitive, training current employees is a lot more efficient and dependable option than looking for new hires to address skill gaps.
Employee Involvement in Retraining Labor Forces
It’s not novel to involve workers as equal partners in the retraining process. Now more than ever, it is critical that your workforce feels they have significant say over their professional development as a result of the tightening labor market.
Nobody is arguing that you should hand over control of your workforce re-skilling efforts to them. However, your re-skilling programs will be more successful if your employees feel like they are contributing members of a team rather than interchangeable parts.
Part of this goal can be met by highlighting the practical benefits employees will reap from this training in light of the ever-evolving nature of their jobs. With additional information, workers may more easily see why retraining is beneficial to their careers. Working together, you can show the worker that their input is valued and used in determining the next steps of their training.