Reskilling is very important in organisations that are innovating and who are looking to digitally transform their businesses. When as an organisation you decide to reskill, you have 2 options, hire those who have these skills or you take the responsibility to reskill your current workforce. I recommend reskilling your current workforce.
According to Mckinsey, it pays organisations up to 75% to reskill an employee. As organisations continue to embrace the digital trend, the skill gap increases and this creates more gaps between the current skills employees have and the skills they need. While this may mean training most of the workforce, it delivers results that include enhancing service delivery and improving customer experience, increasing team productivity and promoting workplace satisfaction. This is considering that these employees are already in the systems and will not require too much to embrace change that reskilling is a necessity.
The Covid-19 era seemed to make the need to reskill obvious as we saw organisations making the urgent transition from on-site to remote work. Most companies who were never prepared for something like that and were forced to make that transition are struggling to understand and take the steps need to bridge the gap.
Reskilling employees is one of such actions needed to manage the workforce strategically. As organisation embraces the change, there’s hardly any employee who does not need reskilling to effectively perform their jobs if they are a forward-thinking organisation.
The benefits of reskilling employees far outweigh hiring new employees and it gets worse for organisations who choose to do nothing at all. For organisations considering new hires who have invested in gaining these skills themselves, they should understand that they will be asking for higher pay and who knows how many other companies are looking for ready-made reskilled employees. Also, just because not a lot of people can take on the challenge to get these in-demand skills, supply is scarce hence the high cost of hiring the already skilled ones.
For organisations who don’t mind the cost and go ahead to hire, they are faced with time delays as these new hires need ample time to understand the business, its culture, and processes before they started delivering results. For organisation that has gone through the rigorous exercise of creating the right structure, and procedures for their business, and ensuring they adhere to compliance, it sure will take time for new hires to blend in. But reskilling existing employees can save time.
Existing employees learning new skills can be a great motivation. They feel the impact of organisations investing in progress and development. This in turn improves their loyalty and increases productivity. There’s the challenge of those who resist change but once they know that their obsolete skills will not save their jobs, they’ll sit up and ensure they are not left out.
At Tiva Creative, we help organisations drive the adoption of Suitable Digital Business Solutions, setup and train teams to drive digital transformation within the organisation. With Digital Solutions, you can use technology platforms, tools and systems to optimise and automate processes, enhance service delivery and improve customer experience, increase team productivity and promote workplace satisfaction.