To thrive in today’s modern world of work and keep up with evolving business demands, learning and development (L&D) leaders must craft a future-ready workforce — resilient, sustainable and capable of responding to ongoing changes in today’s business landscape. This requires developing an effective training strategy that supports business needs, aligning L&D’s training offerings with business objectives. L&D must also equip their workforce with the skills and knowledge needed to achieve organizational success and fulfill new tasks that may arise inside the company.

In a future-ready workforce, employees have the ability to adapt to changes in the workplace. They embody a growth mindset, allowing them to face challenges and adversity with innovation and creativity. A future-ready workforce is also sustainable with low employee attrition and a powerful internal mobility strategy. Employees receive lifelong training opportunities that empower them to build new capabilities and/or move vertically or laterally in the organization. To reach these new heights, upskilling and reskilling must be at the forefront of every organizations’ learning strategy.

In this article, we’ll review why skilling talent is a necessity for business success, the difference between upskilling and reskilling and lastly, how they can help L&D leaders foster a continuous learning culture. To begin, let’s evaluate the benefits of skilling talent.

Benefits of Skilling Talent

When it comes to deciding whether or not to develop a solid learning strategy, organizations can choose to sink or swim. L&D leaders play a significant role in developing an adaptable workforce that knows how to respond to unprecedented changes. To craft this type of workforce, L&D leaders will need to skill their current talent pool.

Skilling talent can:

• Reduce training and hiring costs. The cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times the cost of an employee’s annual salary. And in most cases, organizations have the power to reduce attrition rates. Training your current talent pool in much-needed skills can reduce the need to hire new employees to fill open roles.
• Retain company knowledge. With less employees leaving the organization and more employees moving up to fulfill new job roles or functions, company knowledge can be retained and used to respond to new challenges and innovate faster.
• Support internal mobility. Training employees can give them the skills to advance in their careers inside of the organization and to take on greater responsibilities.
• Create a learning culture. In a learning culture, employees are empowered to grow new skills and continuously improve their performance. When an organization shows its investment to their people through learning offerings, they’re demonstrating the significant value L&D has to the business.

The Difference Between Upskilling and Reskilling

Though similar in their impact and approach to developing new skills and capabilities inside the organization, upskilling and reskilling aren’t synonymous. Understanding the differences between upskilling and reskilling can allow L&D professionals to make the right decisions for training. Let’s take a look at the differences between upskilling and reskilling employees.

• Upskilling involves building upon employees’ skills and strengths to enhance their skills sets and help them adapt to changes in their role. Upskilling talent promotes continuous development and prepares them to take on changes in the business world. For example, L&D professionals can upskill manufacturers on how to use an artificial intelligence (AI)-based tool on the field to reduce service time.
• Reskilling is the process of training employees to complete new tasks and job functions outside of their current role and existing skill set. L&D leaders can reskill employees to meet the demand of a new role inside the organization. Instead of having to hire new talent, L&D leaders can train high-potential employees with transferable skills to fulfill roles in the company. An example of reskilling can include training a help desk specialist or an information technology (IT) technician in the skills to become a software engineer internally.

Understanding the difference between upskilling and reskilling can give learning leaders more insight into what their workforce needs to be sustainable. As mentioned earlier, upskilling and reskilling a workforce can promote a learning culture — where everyone is encouraged to take autonomy of their learning journey, and develop new skills to meet emerging demands in their role and improve their performance to deliver better outcomes. To cultivate a culture of learning and successfully upskill and reskill employees, L&D leaders must establish a structured framework for continuous development and improvement.

How to Create a Continuous Learning Culture

A continuous learning culture relies on continuous performance management. This means feedback should be an ongoing occurrence and embedded within check-ins and one on ones. Annual performance reviews should be replaced with a regular cadence of feedback to improve performance. Employees should also be encouraged to seek resources and additional learning to meet business expectations and goals.

For this to succeed, managers and employees must have a common language to analyze performance. The Situational Leadership ^®  methodology is a practical tool that provides leaders and their employees with a framework to evaluate employee performance based on their Performance Readiness^® Level in completing a specific task, function or objective. Using continuous learning culture, leaders can accurately interpret and respond to their employees’ performance needs, diagnosis areas of improvement and advance development.

With a framework, such as Situational Leadership ^®, L&D leaders can equip their organization’s leadership team with a consistent and effective approach to managing their teams’ performance and development — the key to cultivating a continuous learning culture.

Conclusion

Upskilling and reskilling should be a priority in every organization. According to research, the half-life of skills is five years, and by 2025, approximately one-half of the global labor workforce may need reskilling. In addition, 1 in 4 workers report that they don’t possess the skills and capabilities they need in their current job. L&D leaders are responsible for ensuring that their people have what they need to perform well and contribute to innovating and making important business decisions. They’re also tasked with equipping company leaders with an effective model to support continuous performance management.

With these steps in their toolkit, L&D leaders can successfully upskill and reskill employees, accelerate business success and champion leadership to diagnosis performance needs in a culture of continuous learning.