Statistically:
All this is pressuring organizations to consider how to reskill and upskill employees to maintain necessary capabilities in house without relying heavily on external talent markets that are already stretched thin. On the upside, many companies are already doubling down on learning investments to make progress on this front. By 2025, the world’s companies will spend almost $400 billion annually on e-learning.
That said, throwing money at this problem isn’t a solution in and of itself. Organizations’ learning spend should be directly aligned to current and future business needs to make an impact. The skills being taught now may not necessarily map to the business’s strategic direction. What’s more, many companies are failing to connect retrained employees to internal roles and projects once training is complete. Without implementing those connections at scale, these organizations stand to lose even more than their original learning investments; they run the risk of losing people too.
How do we get more strategic about reskilling and upskilling?
Creating meaningful experiences for adults to learn and grow is a seminal challenge of our time. The problem is no longer just about retraining people, but rather creating an adaptive workforce. The reskilling and upskilling framework must be thought of as a circular process instead of a one-and-done exercise. It should become a fluid, ongoing activity fuelled by data, aligned to business needs, and tweaked again and again as drivers change.
It’s time to reimagine reskilling and upskilling through a tech-supported map, develop, move approach. How?
1. Use AI to create intelligent mapping. Intelligent mapping helps leaders understand the exact size and shape of a given skill gap. The foundational framework must be informed by the data. The good news is AI now allows us to accomplish this much more quickly than in the past, and at scale. Using these improved tools also enables us to assess many more factors at once.
For example, you can go beyond understanding what skills the organization possesses now to actually predict the capabilities that will be necessary in the future. Using AI, we can get clarity around the disruption and changes that are taking shape on a regular basis, and how they’re influencing the skills an organization will need.
These tools can structure the data in ways that support the degree to which a given employee’s skills align to business requirements, and to what degree the individual possesses those skills and their related proficiency. Organizations can now create these intelligent maps quickly at scale, to spot data-backed gaps at any time.
2. Ground development programs on fresh insight. Armed with intelligent maps that highlight existing skills and critical gaps, you can start making more strategic decisions about learning and development programs. This empowers you to reprioritize budgets to ensure learning and development content and curriculum tie to the specific gaps reflected within the data. You can invest much more strategically, focusing on training that directly supports operations and business growth.
Approaching development in this way can help companies deliver stronger return on learning investments. And the circular nature of this data-backed framework allows you to continually adjust course as skill gaps evolve, market forces change, or business priorities evolve. It’s an always-on approach that means your people are never static; rather, new needs trigger new learning programs that come online based on those needs.
3. Match people strategically to close gaps. Mapping and developing talent are only two pieces of the puzzle. You should also invest in new ways to connect employees — and their upskilled or reskilled capabilities — to the right opportunities. This ensures people can unleash their potential without leaving the company to grow elsewhere. Leaders need visibility into the evolving skillsets employees possess. Talent teams require an understanding of how the in-house capabilities are changing, so they can align opportunities for internal movement into open roles and new projects.
These tactics are game changers. Taking a tech-backed approach allows us to move people to the right roles and projects faster, so we can see the full benefit of upskilling and reskilling investments right away. We also provide meaningful ways for employees to use those skills to grow within an organization and pursue additionally valuable learning over time. Making skills data visible and creating connections between leaders and other employees is essential.
What’s the bottom line?
Deploying technology to embrace a circular approach to reskilling and upskilling talent can help organizations retain the people they need to succeed, while making learning investments more potent. Use AI to kickstart that evolution through a data-backed map, develop, move framework — with strong governance throughout. This is critical for any organization to make the very most of learning and talent in a hyperdisrupted, skills-starved world.
