What Is Reskilling and Upskilling?

Take a moment to reflect on your own career journey. Have you always worked in the same type of role, growing and learning progressively through on-the-job experience and advanced professional development? Or has your career been less of a straight line, zigzagging between different industries or roles as you worked to discover your professional passions and strengths?

Whether your career has been linear or more S-shaped, you’re not alone. Some people discover their passion early and doggedly work to build their knowledge and deepen their existing strengths. Others discover their strengths and professional passions by trying out different paths and learning what they enjoy—and, just as importantly, what they don’t—in a role. 

There are different ways to promote employee upskilling—whether that’s in pursuit of deepening their existing skills or building new ones altogether. Let's explore how reskilling and upskilling helps both employers and employees along with upskilling and reskilling examples.

What is reskilling vs. upskilling?

Reskilling and upskilling both center around developing new skills, but they aren’t one and the same. Reskilling is the process of developing new skills outside your current skill set, typically with the goal of moving into a new job or career.

Upskilling, on the other hand, refers to the process of building on your existing skills to advance in your current job or career.

The difference between upskilling and reskilling, then, is about what you’re hoping to achieve through building your skills. If you’re developing skills to get better at your job, you’re upskilling; if you’re doing it to change jobs altogether, you’re reskilling.

Imagine you have an office job that’s recently started requiring you to give regular presentations to leaders both inside and outside your department. You’ve never felt confident public speaking and sometimes struggle to formulate your thoughts. So, to build your confidence, you take a course on public speaking to develop strategies you can use to feel less nervous and better engage your audience. That would be an example of upskilling.

Now let’s say you take that course on public speaking, and, despite learning strategies to ease your nerves, you still dread presenting at these meetings. You take stock of your career trajectory, and realize that growing in your position is only going to require more face time in important meetings. This reflection helps you realize this may not be the job for you, and you start cross-training to move into a completely different role that’s more behind the scenes. This would be an example of reskilling. 

What is an example of reskilling? 

We’ve outlined one example of reskilling already, but it can take many shapes, so let’s review a few more reskilling examples: 

• An insurance agent who’s always had a passion for home baking enrolls in a pastry and baking certificate at a local community college, later opening a café in their small town.
• A house painter enrolls in a training program sponsored by a large local employer that will pay him as he trains to become a CNC machinist. 
• A human resources generalist, seeing the demand for data scientists at her company, enrolls in a master’s in data science using tuition assistance from her company with the goal of moving from HR into this high-demand role. 

What is an example of upskilling?

Now that we’ve covered some examples of reskilling, let’s also explore some upskilling examples:

• A middle school teacher studies online for his master’s degree in education, through which he gains theoretical and practical knowledge that can be applied to his classroom—and a pay raise.
• An executive who’s starting to build out a global team takes a professional education course on cross-cultural communication to learn the nuances of communicating with employees and customers in different regions of the world. 
• The new manager of a team that’s struggled with infighting and high turnover enrolls all team members in a three-month online training to teach them conflict-resolution skills. 

Why upskilling and reskilling is important

Now that we’ve established what upskilling and reskilling are—why are they important? And why are more employers investing resources in both reskilling and upskilling their employees? 

For many employers, upskilling and reskilling is a way to close skills gaps and prepare for the work of tomorrow. In the Fall 2022 Fortune/Deloitte CEO survey, 121 CEOs representing more than 15 industries shared their perspectives and predictions heading into 2023. Nearly all (94%) expect to see talent shortages for certain roles, and more than half (58%) are reskilling/upskilling workers in response.

In other words, employers are reskilling and upskilling for a future-ready workforce. By giving employees opportunities to build on their existing skills—and, as needed, to build entirely new skills—they’re building a workforce that will be ready for the changing world of work.  

If you’re looking to build your employees’ skills to better prepare for the future of work, we can help.