The global business market has undergone a paradigm shift due to industrialization and technological advancements such as Automation, IoT, AI, robotics, etc. Therefore, to stay relevant and meet the changing market demands, organizations need to ensure that their workforce is well-equipped with advanced skillsets.
This raises some pertinent questions-
What actions can businesses take to build the workforce of the future?
How to stay competitive and relevant to meet global market demands?
Well, organizing retraining and upskilling programs for the workforce is one of the best ways to bridge the existing skills gap and future-proof the workforce. This will empower the employees to thrive in a dynamic, fast-paced world and position the organization for long-term success.
This blog discusses the importance of training and reskilling and the different ways to facilitate them.
First, let’s look at the basics,
1. Why future-proofing the workforce is important?
As discussed earlier, the rapid technological advancements in different sectors have created the need for new skillsets and competencies. Since hiring new resources is often expensive; therefore, enterprises can organize retraining and upskilling programs for existing employees to futureproof them.
Retraining refers to relearning and updating existing skills and competencies, eventually improving employee performance. Upskilling, on the other hand, refers to providing training and development programs to help employees learn new skills and diversify their portfolios.
Both these methods help employees to diversify their skillsets and take on multiple roles and responsibilities, thereby reducing hiring costs. It also helps boost employee morale, individual performance, and organizational growth. This way, organizations can stay competitive in the technological-driven era.
In the following section, let’s take a look at how an organization can implement the same.
2. 5 ways organizations can implement training and upskilling programs
Organizations can yield impeccable results from training and upskilling their existing employees. The following section shows some effective ways to implement this program seamlessly.
2.1 Identify skill gaps and create a training and upskilling calendar
Every organization has a unique strategic goal for which they need to identify whether the relevant skillsets are available in their talent pool. Managers can track pipeline projects and determine the skills gap. Accordingly, they can create a training calendar to help in this process.
The training calendar must outline the various learning methods to upskill the workforce, the training timeline, budget, etc. Before implementing the strategy, managers must ensure that the training materials are updated and align with the new demands. Furthermore, the training timeline must be scheduled according to the employees’ availability and bandwidth to ascertain their presence. Last but not the least, the organization must identify effective trainers to deliver these courses.
2.2 Formulate Individual Development Plan supported by L&D team
Employees in an organization have different skills, competencies, strengths, and shortcomings. Therefore, there cannot be a one size fits all approach to their training sessions as it will not be relevant for all employees. Instead, managers should formulate Individual Development Plans (IDP) to create customized training and upskilling programs for every employee.
They need to ensure that the programs help in meeting employees’ career goals as well as organizational objectives. Moreover, when employees are given the leeway to choose learning programs of their interest, it increases their participation in honing their skills and makes them future-ready.
2.3 Provide on-the-job training and shadowing opportunities
At times employees may not need extensive coaching and training sessions as they partially possess the competencies required for the necessary skillset. In such a situation, managers can provide on-the-job training and shadowing opportunities enabling them to gain experience by working in a practical scenario.
This strategy can work as an asset for the organization as such employees can often step in for shared workload or when their peers are absent. In addition, trainees get to ask questions and clear their doubts in real-time during these opportunities. This will also help employees to self-evaluate their competencies for different positions and responsibilities in the organization.
2.4 Facilitate cross-departmental collaboration for employees
Instead of just learning new skills for the same role, managers can encourage cross-departmental collaboration as a great way to train and upskill their employees. When resources are switched between different departments and job roles at regular intervals, it will give an added advantage in honing new skills.
In addition, it will enable multi-skill building as they take on new roles and responsibilities, giving them exposure to all the verticals of the organization. Cross-departmental collaboration helps in future-proofing the workforce, reducing the monotony of the job, and gaining additional insights.
2.5 Evaluate progress periodically and give constructive feedback
Deploying training and upskilling programs alone is only half the battle won for creating a future-proof workforce. Once employees have completed these sessions, managers must evaluate their performance and progress to determine their success.
In addition, they should provide constructive feedback and post-assessment tests and discussions. Depending on this feedback and performance results, managers can find out if there are any gaps in the training programs and improve them. They can also include employee feedback on these programs to know what worked well and what didn’t.
Now, let us look at how a resource management tool can help organizations future-proof their workforce.
3. How can an advanced resource management software help?
Saviom’s advanced resource management software comprises various features such as resource scheduling, forecasting & capacity planning, resource planning, etc., that help future-proofing the workforce in your organization.
With forecasting, managers can perform forward-planning for pipeline projects and identify skills and competencies required for future demands. Accordingly, resource managers can analyze capacity vs. demand report and identify the gaps. That way, one can implement the right resourcing treatments such as retraining and upskilling.
In addition, the tool provides 360-degree visibility of enterprise resources and their attributes, such as skills, experience, etc. This helps managers to customize the IDPs and build an effective training strategy for each employee.
Besides, using the tool, managers can scrutinize ‘people on the bench’ reports and get information of the resources that are not utilized due to mismatch/lack of skills. They can be accordingly trained to ensure billability.
4. Conclusion
As businesses move into an era of globalization and automation, the need for advanced skills will also increase rapidly. Therefore, organizations should invest in their existing resource pool with training and upskilling program to keep them relevant. With the help of a resource management tool one can create a future-ready workforce to remain competitive in the global market.
