Helping and guiding employees to constantly upgrade their technology skills has tremendous benefits to business in the long run.
The pace of technology change has not slowed, even during COVID, and we currently have a huge skills gap in almost all industries. Upskilling and/or reskilling employees allows your company to stay current on the latest technology innovations and help your firm achieve an advantage over your competition. To quote global consulting firm McKinsey, “To emerge stronger from the COVID-19 crisis, companies should start reskilling their workforces now.”
Making the Case for Upskilling/Reskilling
Competitive advantage – Helping your valuable employees upgrade their technology skills enhances their engagement in the success of your organization. Turnover is a consistent and costly problem for organizations and investing in providing your employees with additional technology skills has been found to be a major differentiator in addressing retention challenges. Top talent always cares about continuous learning and applying their new knowledge. If you are designing the training program, I recommend having a plan on providing your top talent opportunities to train and use their newly acquired skills to solve business challenges.
Team Morale and Customer Satisfaction – Upskilling and/or reskilling initiatives at your organization are great morale boosters and may provide new career paths for employees. These translate to happier employees and improved customer satisfaction. Reskilling also helps the entire company stay on top of technology and industry trends, which in turn help build better solutions to solve critical business problems for you and your customers.
Cost – As you may already be familiar, it generally costs much lesser to upskill an existing team member than to hire and train a new employee. With technology automation forcing big changes in business, it’s important for companies to spend time protecting their valuable employees by helping them reskill for changes that lie ahead.
Knowledge Retention – Every time you lose an employee to their replacement, you lose valuable historical data that is cached within your current worker’s mind and workflows. No database or knowledge management program can substitute knowledge lost when a key employee leaves.
Upskilling will work for you but getting to where you need to be at the speed and scale required to get you there is at times, easier said than done. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) says that 83% of hiring teams are having problems retaining and recruiting new technology talent.
At Blackstone Talent Group, we help you build and grow great teams. We are technology experts with a wide network of talented technologists who can address your team needs better and faster than others. Our boutique agency approach has earned us consistently high levels of customer happiness due to unparalleled service and support. We’d love to talk to you about helping your business.