Reskilling And Upskilling To Meet Fashionable Wants

Developing retraining and continuing education to meet today’s challenges

In a survey conducted by McKinsey, 87% of executives said they have skill gaps either now or in the next few years. This represents a serious lack of competence and the burden on managers and employees to meet expectations is great. Executives face challenges such as managing remote teams, making sure those teams are agile, and identifying new skills that are required to run them. At the same time, employees must constantly develop and improve their specialist knowledge in order to meet the requirements in addition to their workplace tasks.

The 2021 retraining goes deeper and addresses initiatives such as automation, social justice, talent retention and employee eviction. For example, learning with a learning management system (LMS) can be the solution to these and other skills gap trends.

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Automation and professional retraining and continuing education efforts

Even before the pandemic, automation and AI were two major challenges that influenced the labor market and displaced workers whose jobs were taken over by machines. In fact, a report by the World Economic Fund states that around 30% of all tasks are currently performed by machines. By 2025 this number will rise to 50%. With this shift, there are opportunities for new jobs that require retraining of the emerging and current workforce.

An LMS is a natural solution to retraining needs. It can help identify current employees who have at least some of the education and skills required to learn a job. You may also find a group of current employees who might move to a new department. For example, your customer service reps are likely to have expert knowledge of your products and services, so retraining any part of your customer service team for sales or account management may require very little additional training.

With an LMS, clearly defined learning paths that build the skills and knowledge necessary for a new job are an important part of these initiatives. It might be worth giving employees the opportunity to learn from experienced colleagues on discussion forums if you have experts among the employees. A simple solution would be to use content providers with extensive course libraries that can be easily uploaded to an LMS. Depending on your learning platform, there are a number of options for implementing retraining and upgrading initiatives.

Training your employees in terms of social inclusion, diversity and sensitivity

While diverse work environments have been a priority for many years, their importance is even clearer today. With social justice movements around the world, it is important that your company provides a workplace with equality and respect.

Diversity training has ethical, social, and financial benefits that will have a positive impact on your business. Another McKinsey study shows that ethnic diversity training companies have 35% better financial returns than the national average. Those with an emphasis on gender diversity have a 15% higher financial return than the national average.

Additionally, a company that offers diversity and inclusion training is likely to attract more top talent, especially Millennial and Generation Z candidates, who make up a large portion of the global workforce. Diversity training also improves corporate culture and collaboration, while helping to reduce unconscious biases in the workplace.

To achieve this type of work environment, educate your employees through company-wide training on diversity and inclusion. There are many standard options, or you can create your own. In addition to delivering the actual training, an LMS can be used to promote a positive and collaborative learning environment. Participants can interact, work together, learn from each other, and solve problems to actively understand new concepts.

Tap an LMS with robust analytics to measure the effectiveness of these retraining and development efforts. View course completion rates to get an insight into the courses that learners found most useful, and set up automatic reminders for learners who haven’t completed the required training.

Retaining talent through retraining and further education

Retraining and further education services go beyond guaranteeing optimal employee performance. Its importance to businesses has grown and the benefits have become apparent. According to Workable, talent retention and productivity are some other positive outcomes:

75% of the companies stated that retraining and further education had a positive effect on productivity.
63% of companies said that retraining and further education had a positive effect on the company’s reputation.
58% of the companies stated that retraining and further training had a positive effect on employee loyalty.

Most employees want to expand their professional skills. If they feel stagnant in their development, at some point they can leave – and churn can be costly. The cost of replacing a single employee can range from half to double the employee’s annual salary.

Failure to retrain or further qualify your employees also contributes to employee churn in the form of displacement, in which employees are dismissed due to the loss of their jobs. Retraining can prevent this unfortunate situation by training your employees for another job so they don’t have to be laid off and you can save on new hiring costs.

Whether you’re managing remote teams or on-site, you can leverage your LMS tools to help your learners stay one step ahead and correct skills gap trends.

Conclusion

Even if it doesn’t seem like it, retraining and continuing education play a crucial role in your overall learning culture. While retraining initiatives are usually a more formalized process, the encouragement of self-directed skills development through your culture may be due to future retraining and upgrading opportunities.

If you want to expand or improve your learning culture, download the eBook, Lifelong L&D: How To Develop A Continuous Learning Culture To Support Modern Work Environments, for strategic tips, evolving L&D trends, and best practices to support your modern learners a learning management system.