It is no secret that companies should embrace reskilling and learning and development at scale if they are to emerge from the COVID-19 crisis stronger and more resilient than ever.
With several universities temporarily pausing their learning or even pushing forward the commencement of new semesters, talent managers can expect a cumulative delay in the entrance of new talent. In fact, this can already be seen by the absence of strong campus placements in countries like India & Brazil, where fresh graduates are scooped up from campuses.
Combine this with the fact that employees are more likely to seek comfort in the familiar during troubled times and are, therefore, unlikely to make a move to a new company; it is clear that the usually dynamic talent market has become stagnant.
Of course, this is only a temporary situation. The talent market will once again become dynamic, and fresh graduates will join the workforce with renewed vigor.
However, talent analysts are sounding the alarm bells over another major problem that has so far evaded disclosure.
In Times of Disruption, Upgrade Workforce Skillset with Employee Training
That problem was one of a growing mismatch between the skills that companies need and the skills that employees (existing or new ones) had.
Pre-2020, this issue was contained by rapid hiring initiatives without a care in the world about rising attritions rates.
Companies gladly took on new projects that required completely new skillsets. And when they found that they didn’t have the required skillsets, they simply went shopping at the local talent hotspot. The existing employees? Do they stand a chance against this new talent that comes out of college with cutting-edge skills?
Well, it all depends on how amenable they are to reskilling. So far, reskilling was only restricted to such scenarios, where experienced employees opted for self-paced courses at outrageous prices seeking to remain relevant.
However, the tables have turned now.
With the seemingly unending talent pool drying up and new companies sprouting up almost every day, it has become imperative for service providers to hold on to their experienced employees.
But that’s not enough. Most are going a step further by investing in training and development in their reskilling as opposed to hiring fresh candidates. Especially since it has been quantitatively shown that reskilling is ~23% more efficient than hiring fresh talent.
The Failure Of Reskilling Strategies To Elevate Your Workforce Skillset
Only 40% of employees believe that their current skillsets will be competitive in the next ten years. Given the rapid pace of technology, this 40% is bound to get a shock when they realize that the half-life of technology skills has further reduced by another 5 years! This is according to industry reports analyzing the talent ecosystem for the period of 2010-2019.
The authors of this report also note that unless learning and development stakeholders take urgent action to accelerate the design, development and deployment of reskilling initiatives, companies will struggle to find and keep skilled candidates, and current skilled employees will lose relevance.
Credit where it’s due, most L&D have taken up reskilling initiatives wholeheartedly and are striving to inculcate a strong culture of continuous learning within their companies.
But the going’s not all good.
Stakeholders are increasingly finding that their Re/Upskilling programs are not having the desired outcomes despite implementing existing best practices. While these best practices are no doubt developed by talent experts, it’s imperative that they also contain inputs from technology domain experts to make them practical.
Talent experts often focus, rather one-sidedly, on the ‘skill’ aspect. The leads to them being blind to the numerous ways one can achieve a given skill.
In other words, what is lacking is a robust framework for enabling reskilling.
The Only Reskilling Strategy You Need Is To Build A Solid Framework
Like most good intentions in business, failure to plan is planning to fail. And this is doubly true for reskilling because absent a solid reskilling framework, enterprises run the risk of:
- Reskilling the wrong talent
- Reskilling the right talent in the wrong skill
To prevent these mistakes from happening, learning & development teams can leverage Draup’s Reskilling Framework to implement reskilling programs successfully.
This reskilling framework provides step-by-step guidance for talent managers in the below areas:
Critical Skills Identification
Identify the critical skills & competencies for your enterprise by conducting an extensive analysis of JDs, profiles, service offerings, strategies , and various other organization talent attributes
Digital Intentions Mapping
Prioritize which job roles are in need of urgent reskilling by identifying and interpreting emerging digital themes and industry-wide advancements.
Disrupted Roles Identification
Identify redundant roles in the organization and mark them for up/reskilling by evaluating their skills-adjacency to in-demand job roles. This can be achieved using the Draup Reskilling Simulator tool.
Peer Analysis
Better understand the market position of the organization and the competition talent-wise and skills-wise compared to your nearest competitor.
Perform a competitive analysis to further benchmark the organization‘s digital intentions, capabilities , and technological infrastructure to bridge the gap with the industry.
Role Mapping
Avoid the biggest reskilling pitfall by following a systematic approach to matching your high-priority digital requirements with ideal job clusters or individual roles.
Develop Customized Learning Journeys
Once you have completed the Role Mapping stage, the next step is to identify highly customized learning journeys that vary based on the individual and also based on the target job role.
An example of such a reskilling learning journey can be found in the image below.
Next, you need to prototype your custom reskilling framework by implementing the reskilling model on a few select job roles from smaller job families to further refine it and upscale it based on stakeholder feedback.
What you have seen above is a mere glimpse into the full power of Draup’s AI-powered reskilling.
Draup identifies the skillset and maps it with the existing list of courses and programs present in its extensive database.
Learning Management teams are in complete control of end-to-end Employee training and reskilling programs with functionality to restrict course & certifications recommendations by partners.
