We are living in an ever-changing labor market with many technologies that claim to solve your upskilling challenges. It’s time-consuming to figure out what is best for your organization. While it’s tempting to start by assessing technology platforms, consider focusing first on the outcomes you want to achieve. Learn how you can approach upskilling (and reskilling) in the age of artificial intelligence (AI).

Who Has In-Demand Skills? Upskill People You Can Keep

Assess your organization’s willingness and readiness to change. Evaluate the current state of skills your organization has today. Then work towards understanding what skills your organization will need in the future. Identify the people best suited to develop those skills. Organizations that plan and take part in upskilling initiatives are better suited to deal with the outcomes of rapid change, as well as reap their benefits.

Tech tip: Consider using an external tool to build a skills inventory that uses industry benchmarks and maps to your organization’s competency framework. This helps you understand how skills in your workforce compare to the market.

Upskill People You Can’t Keep

Not everyone in an organization can be upskilled and retained. Identify the most at-risk people affected by upcoming changes and develop a transition plan. Those who develop future-focused skills can remain competitive, even if at another organization, allowing them greater flexibility and increased options. This also improves your organization’s reputation in the job market.

Tech tip: Connect transitioning employees to job marketplaces that map their current skills to labor market insight for the best outplacement opportunities. Organizations can provide an outgoing employee with a data export of their skills, how they are valued in the market, how they compare to others and where to upskill to be competitive.

Focus Forward With Feedback at Scale

As part of your upskilling and reskilling plan, identify roles and individuals to get feedback from, such as people who find new roles, people who don’t, managers with new employees and organizational leaders. Get qualitative and quantitative feedback from those transitioning to a new role or whose role has been eliminated. Before the move, gather sentiment about the transition. After the move, track employee engagement and debrief about the transition. Ensure the feedback influences communications and decision-making. Implement feedback systems at scale to help your organization understand employee interests and desires.

Tech tip: Use natural language processing, a form of AI and machine learning, for sentiment analysis to gather qualitative insight at scale in the form of employee listening. Balance solicited feedback from surveys with observational and behavioral feedback from systems employees already use to do work, such as task management, messaging and customer relationship tools.

A Positive Employee Experience

Measure internal and external brand reputation, as well as how your organization is perceived, to measure the success of your upskilling strategy. Your organization’s reputation is greatly affected by current and former employees. For transitioning employees, a smooth offboarding process can have a significant impact on recruiting and customer perception.

Tech tip: Use eNPS (employee net promoter score) to better understand employee satisfaction in your organization. Use eNPS with other employee engagement metrics, such as employee performance and customer happiness, to get a comprehensive view of your organization’s employee experience.

More Ways to Use AI

It’s becoming common to use AI for researching in-demand skills, summarizing meetings and generating images. Organizations can boost their upskilling efforts with AI by leveraging chatbots to provide career coaching guidance and create tailored learning paths for every employee. The best use of technology combines personalization and scalability.

As AI is increasingly used in the workplace, it’s rarely an out-of-the-box solution. AI needs to be configured and adapted to the upskilling needs of an organization. Only then can its true power be unleashed.