How reskilling can boost employee retention: 5 proven steps to make it work

The Importance of Reskilling for Employee Retention

Today’s organizational decision-makers know how important it is to retain talent. Just last year over 50 million people left their jobs in the U.S. alone, beating the landmark 2021 numbers of the pandemic. Employers and strategic people management are thinking about what it takes to keep good workers, commit to building a positive work culture in light of the pandemic, and try to move forward from a time marked with employment uncertainty and deep personal and professional anxieties. As research in this area grows, one strategy that is receiving increasing attention is reskilling within the workplace. 

Reskilling simply refers to the acquisition of new skills so that an individual can prepare to do a different job. Of course, employees reskill themselves all of the time—this might mean taking night courses or attaining a professional certificate. The challenge when employees reskill themselves is that it often has the result of leaving your organization and moving towards another. Current research supports this, with career switching as a primary contributor as to why so many left their jobs last year. But reskilling within your organization? That involves working with employees, understanding where their interests and untapped talents lie, and working together moving them towards other professional positions within the organization with intention. As a matter of fact, the intentionality behind reskilling your people is what helps to make reskilling such an important retention strategy. 

Intentional and Collaborative Reskilling - Why Do It?

Why do employees seek to reskill in the first place?
Well the answer is one part cultural, one part necessity, and one part psychological.

Culturally, career changes and multiple career paths are more popular than ever because the norm of working for one company your entire career has gone away with the turn of the century. This has many reasons, and some of them are financial, such as the relative disappearance of pension systems that incentivize people to stay within the organization the duration of their careers. 

Career changes have also become a relative necessity. We live in a time of unprecedented technological change, and history is showing us that there’s never been such rapid changes to how technology impacts how we live and work from one decade to the next. Individuals are finding they need to reskill themselves to stay employable and current. Meanwhile, organizations are needing to have people with the knowledge and skills to allow the organization to remain competitive, which involves either external hiring or internal reskilling. 

Lastly, reskilling is psychological. Generally speaking, human beings like to learn. Employees want to learn new skills because it helps to reaffirm their identities as intellectually curious human beings. It also prevents them from getting bored, and helps to engage them while at work, which is what they want because being bored or underutilized at your job can be pretty exhausting. 

Reskilling Requires Proactive Planning — 5 Steps You Must Follow

Of course if reskilling were so easy and instantly beneficial, every organization would already be doing it, particularly as the fight to attract and retain talent grows fiercer. Reskilling is challenging because it requires organization and planning. Organizations need to know what employees are interested in, understand who might be ready for a change, proactively plan those meetings, and, of course, know the types of positions and skills the organization will need in the future to remain competitive.

The magic mix of retention through reskilling is matching the new skills garnered from the reskill with the needs of organization and simultaneously re-engaging employees that may have been otherwise lost to their career change.

In order to begin reskilling, organizations need to simultaneously do due diligence in five key areas.
 

• First, they need to understand what skills they currently have across their workforce.

This involves aggregating all the data that sits across existing HR systems — HCM, LMS, ATS and more — to build a real-time view of skills, capabilities, and potential at an organizations, departmental, team, and individual level. Fortunately, this is where AI can support with the heavy lifting versus relying on slow and manual employee input. After all, if you don't know who is in your organization and what skills and skill adjacencies they have, you are unable to unlock the potential of your people and your workplace.

• Second, employers need to take stock of their own future plans and future skill requirements.

This includes identifying what the organization needs to compete, and the skills sets and knowledge that will need to be within the organization within the near-distant future such as in one year, five years, and even looking towards over the next decade. In doing so, and even in knowing that situations and needs will undoubtedly change, leadership can begin marrying interests and talent and learning with need and future plans. 

• Third, employers need to take stock of what learning your organization currently offers.

Is there a premium learning subscription that the organization has that is often forgotten? Are there in-person educational benefits for long-term employees? All of these things are important to note, make clear, and organize. Lastly, is what is currently being offered aligned with the skills your organization needs and what employees are planning on learning long-term? For example, if there are certain technical skills that employees will be reskilling, are the resources to learn those skills available in an organized and tangible way?

• Fourth, employers need to marry together current skills gaps with future plans and learning programs to deliver personalized reskilling experiences for their employees in the flow of work.

Research already shows that most employees are overwhelmed with their learning options at work, and have difficulty navigating all of the tools and resources that organizations acquire to help them succeed. If organizations are going to make great efforts to reskill their people, and all the follow-up work involved, there needs to be a system in place that people actually use. Using workforce intelligence platforms, employers can use AI to match their people to learning opportunities that make sense for their careers and the business needs. From here, employers can nudge employees to personalized learning experiences pulled directly from your LMS that are embedded into the “flow of work”.

• Finally, create a reskilling pipeline to track and report on your efforts.

Employees that are dedicating part of their workday to learn new skills need to be checked in on, and there needs to be a way to measure progress and outcomes. Consider a way to organize your reskilling pipeline, including how to identify, measure, and support employees along the way. Because reskilling is not a “one and done” effort, and requires paying attention to employee needs and organizational opportunities long-term, it’s important to be able to take stock of employees as they matriculate and gain tenure within the organization.

Getting Started

Your organization does not have to do this alone. Seek vendors that understand reskilling and partner with them to create employee-friendly hubs of learning, growth, check-ins, and utilize all of that data to help inform people management decisions internally. Ultimately, the yearning to learn provides a tremendous opportunity for organizations to champion reskilling in order to retain their talent. While this may begin as a momentous task, or require some additional proactive planning, the results are unquestionable: engaged employees that stay in the organization longer, bring much-needed skills and knowledge to the workplace, help keep the organization competitive, and prevent the constant shuffle and culture killer that is increased turnover.

Download Skill Up And Win: A Practical Guide for an Evolving Workforce to learn more about the power of skills for your workforce.