How Do You Upskill Your Team?

You know the importance of employee upskilling. You’ve heard how it can help with employee satisfaction and retention, confidence building, and organizational efficiency.

What’s less clear is how to actually get started. That’s understandable, as it can be a lot of work. So let’s talk about why and how to do it as well as where to begin when it comes to developing upskilling programs for employees.

How do you upskill your team?

Have you been considering launching an upskilling program at your company or organization but feel unsure about where to start? Offering an upskilling program can benefit your team in many ways, from better employee retention to a more engaged team to increased productivity. Among business leaders, the most common, primary motivations for offering a program are to build the workforce skills needed for the future (51%), improve employee retention (50%), develop high-potential talent (47%), and increase talent attraction/hiring (43%).

The upsides of offering upskilling opportunities to employees are many, but it can be difficult to know where to get started when it comes to developing an upskilling plan. Let’s dive into what upskilling is and discuss ways you might adopt an upskilling strategy of your own.

What is upskilling in the workplace?

Upskilling in the workplace occurs when employees of an organization are given access to educational or training opportunities that help them grow and develop their skills in their current positions. 

For example, a frontline worker may take a training on customer service to learn tips better serving the customers they interact with every day, or a software engineer may learn a new programming language to stay sharp as their industry evolves. These are both examples of upskilling.

Many companies have instituted employee upskilling programs to help their employees grow. An employee upskilling program is a formal program that an organization adopts to provide training and educational opportunities to employees so they can develop and expand their skills. 

Why upskilling is important for employees?

Organizations benefit when their employees take an active interest in growing their skills but they aren’t the only ones that do. Naturally, so do the employees themselves. For employees, there are many benefits of upskilling. 

Of course, there’s the obvious benefit that upskilling helps them perform better and more efficiently at their jobs. But there are many other upsides, too. An employee with a wide breadth of skills will be more adaptable to shifts that may occur in their organization or in their industry. On top of that, working for an employer that emphasizes professional growth can help employees feel empowered and valued. 

Upskilling can help employees feel more confident in their skills and abilities in their current roles; 54% of Workforce Edge users surveyed believe going back to school with their education benefits has helped them gain confidence in their role.

How to upskill employees  

Employee upskilling can happen formally and informally. Your upskilling strategy may be formal, informal, or some mix of the two.  

An informal approach may, for example, take the shape of a mentor/mentee relationship, where a more senior staff member coaches or trains more junior employees on the job. 

A more formal approach can include adopting an employee upskilling program that offers access to educational opportunities—like certificates or degrees—that are often aligned with career pathways. These programs sometimes reward employees by giving them opportunities to earn raises or move into more advanced positions when they reach educational milestones. 

Some employers create these programs in-house —often the purview of a department like human resources or learning and development—or they may partner with an education benefits management provider like Workforce Edge, which makes it easy for learners to access employer-sponsored educational opportunities.

How do you motivate employees to upskill?

Of course, simply offering upskilling opportunities to your team is no guarantee they’ll use those benefits. That’s why it’s important to make sure employees are not just aware that such benefits exist, but also why they’re being offered and how they can open doors for the employee. Upskilling employees requires them to understand not just the how, but the why. 

“Employers can do a better job of communicating the ‘why’ of their benefits, which they offer because they want their employees to succeed,” says Mikayla Evenstad, Account Manager, Workforce Edge. “Company leaders can create a connection between education and the increased opportunities that can come with it.”

To learn more about options for upskilling your team, contact Workforce Edge today.