Upskilling And Reskilling Initiatives For Your Workforce

In modern work environments, it is vital that employers—and individual employees—adapt to keep up with the speed of change. Often, this means being able to develop skills continuously. While that might sound like the workplace learning equivalent of a hamster wheel, it doesn’t have to feel so much like hard work. The technology within a modern LMS creates an array of opportunities to deliver upskilling and reskilling initiatives.

What Are Upskilling And Reskilling?

Upskilling is learning that results in an employee developing additional skills that enhance their performance in their current role or help to advance their career path.

Reskilling is learning that results in an employee developing new skills that are outside their existing skillset, enabling them to transition to an alternative career path.

Initiatives For Upskilling And Reskilling Using An LMS

There are many upskilling and reskilling initiatives that you can implement using your LMS. Some of the best examples include:

Skills Gaps Analysis

Using your LMS for skills gaps analysis is the obvious starting point for upskilling and reskilling. By building a solid understanding of where the gaps lie for your organization, you can implement targeted upskilling and reskilling initiatives that benefit your organization and its employees.

For the organization, you can create tailored learning programs that promptly and effectively close skills deficiencies. For the individuals within your organization, you can guide them toward skills development that will support their career progression. Being able to show learners how undertaking specific training will help them toward a promotion, a new role, or a different career path is valuable for increasing engagement and boosting morale.

Your LMS reporting system will also enable you to monitor the progress of your initiatives in closing skills gaps. This will allow you to pivot to new or emerging skills gaps.

Social Learning

Social or peer-to-peer learning is one of the most valuable methods for upskilling and reskilling. Informal learning from colleagues accounts for the overwhelming majority of workplace learning. Using your LMS to encourage and structure social learning can have enormous benefits for an organization.

LMS forums, webinars, and workspace features can all be deployed to support upskilling and reskilling. Content curated and shared by in-house experts and thought leaders helps spread skills throughout your organization and break down knowledge silos. Social learning tools can also capture peer feedback within your LMS. This can be useful for helping employees, managers, and L&D leaders understand individual reskilling opportunities.

Staff Retention

Recruitment is expensive and time-consuming, so upskilling and reskilling initiatives that encourage people to stay with your organization can be invaluable. Your LMS can help in this regard in several ways. Firstly, many learning platforms are based on competency frameworks. By tying competencies to specific roles, you can map out a career path for learners. Sharing this with them enables you to target upskilling and reskilling in a way that helps employees see career growth opportunities.

Even showcasing upskilling and reskilling opportunities, and therefore demonstrating your commitment to development, can be a factor in encouraging staff retention. Reskilling initiatives in particular can help retain staff who are unhappy or don’t see a long-term future in their current role. Your LMS increases role mobility, providing an infrastructure that can help people transition to completely different career paths without leaving the organization.

Your LMS can also play a key role in cutting recruitment costs. L&D data can be used to earmark internal recruitment candidates with the skills needed to fulfil a vacant role.

Leadership Development

Managerial and leadership roles were once handed out based on experience and longevity. Using your LMS, you can now ensure they only go to people with the leadership skills needed to thrive in those roles.

Running a leadership development program on your LMS enables you to upskill future leaders. By aligning specific competencies with each leadership role in your organization, you can ensure that candidates have all the skills needed for a particular position.

This is a hugely beneficial reskilling initiative. It takes people with subject matter knowledge in a particular field and equips them with the leadership skills that will be equally important to their success as managers. Equally important, it highlights those who don’t have the aptitude to become leaders.

Personalized Learning Pathways

Arguably the most important of all the upskilling and reskilling opportunities we’ve outlined, personalized learning pathways enable you to tailor opportunities to each employee. This could be guided by skills gaps analysis, career progression opportunities, or input from the employees themselves. In any case, your LMS makes it simple to automate a learning pathway that is customized to the outcomes needed.

As we’ve established, your LMS is based on a competency framework that ties specific skills to each role. This makes it simple to automate tailored pathways that achieve individual career goals while also aligning with wider business goals. The very fact that an employee is working through a personalized program designed to help them progress also drives L&D engagement.

A Culture Of Continuous Learning

A key initiative in promoting upskilling and reskilling is to create a workplace culture in which skills development is the norm. A notable example of this is Google’s 20% policy, which means employees can dedicate one-fifth of their time to projects that interest or excite them.

Your LMS can help you build a learning culture. Bite-sized microlearning helps you build L&D into a regular working day so that it becomes part of the norm, not a separate activity. Your LMS can also be used to reward learning through badges, certificates, and elements of gamification. This increases engagement levels to support your upskilling and reskilling targets.

Conclusion

An LMS is a vital tool in creating, delivering, and monitoring upskilling and reskilling initiatives. Combining all of the features and functionalities available in your LMS with organizational objectives ensures you can use eLearning to develop people with the skills your organization needs. Delivered in the right way, this supports high-level business goals, individual career ambitions, and staff retention.

Synergy Learning LMS

Award winning LMS platforms. Totara Platinum and Moodle Premium Partners, we create exceptional learning platforms for your organisation to reduce training costs, increase employee retention rates and facilitate essential training and compliance.