Finding and recruiting new hires is a tiresome task. It is costly not only in terms of money but also time.
This makes reskilling and upskilling your existing employees important. You may still bear an extra cost of the training, but it will surely be less than the cost of hiring a new employee. Moreover, you won’t be required to wait for them to speed up their performance, and you will increase your chances of retaining them as they will see their training as personal growth.
It is also important for you to ensure your employees are skilled in order to succeed as an organization. It is not easy to find talented and qualified employees and thus filling skill gaps by bringing in new people should not be your first priority.
Close these skill gaps by effectively training the employees that have been with you for a significant amount of time. In this article, you can read about a few tips and tricks that you can use to ensure that your plans for reskilling your employees are on the right track.
Identify the skills you need to work on
Before you can move forward with your training program, the first step should always be the identification of skills that you need your employees to work on.
Without an actual goal or skill in your mind, you will not have the right direction to plan your training towards. Thus, make sure you carry out a training needs analysis to identify the outdated skills.
You should also figure out which team requires what level of training. Doing this is relatively simpler, especially if you were prepared to hire new talent to satisfy the needs of your organization. Now, you simply need to identify the skills you need in your team, and then identify the roles that are most fit to cultivate said skills.
This way, you will have a basic understanding of which departments of your organization need training and the areas of training that need to be addressed.
Choose the right training tools
Reskilling and adding a skill in the lives of your employees require effective and relevant training. The chances that your training will fail will increase if you do not have the right training tools with you.
Firstly, you will require an authoring tool that will enable you to create a genuine and immersive learning experience for your employees. Most authoring tools are preloaded with themes and templates that will enable you to create a basic training experience.
If, on the other hand, you have a specialized, more complex training experience in mind, it is wise to seek the help of a trained instructional designer. Once you have created your learning experience, you will need a tool to share, distribute, and manage your training content.
One of the best tools is perhaps a learning management system or an LMS. But make sure you opt for LMS consulting before you actually pay for the tool to make sure it aligns well with your organization and your authoring tool. Click here to learn more about LMS consulting.
An LMS is a tool that allows you to create and execute relevant training programs for your employees. This means that you can customize your program as per their needs and relevance. You can also add plenty of gamification features to your training program. These features could be anything ranging from leaderboards to badges or reward points. Once you make use of add-ons, you’ll worry less about your workforce engaging with your content.
Besides an LMS and an authoring tool, it is also a good idea to invest in a web conferencing tool. This way, you will be able to provide your employees with an effective blended learning experience that blends self-paced training with the LMS with virtual instructor-led training through the web conferencing tool.
A web conferencing tool will enable you to enjoy the advantages of instructor-led training, while only bearing a fraction of the cost of traditional methods of instructor-led training.
While you may still need to pay instructors and subject matter experts, you will still save on the infrastructure cost of setting up a classroom and the lodging and traveling expenses of the instructors.
Not to forget, providing virtual classroom training is perhaps the only way to provide instructor-led training when social distancing has become an absolute necessity to stay safe. In fact, chances are that remote working will be a significant part of working in the corporate environment in the future, and being prepared to provide employee training virtually will bring your organization long term benefits.
Select the perfect type of reskilling method
Gone are the days when learning was just about a classroom and cramming sessions. Today, learning comes in many methods and types. You just need to figure out which of the methods will work for you and your employees. One of the most popular reskilling methods is industry-specific courses and qualifications.
You would want to go for this method of reskilling when you are looking to train your employees in a specific industry. It helps to enhance the knowledge of employees in their industry of interest and also makes them feel they are being provided training that will help them grow as a professional.
Another one could be blended learning where you are using more than one method of training your employees. For example, you could opt for training your employees on-the-job with digital methods of learning.
Measure your success
Your training will not hold value if you are not measuring the fruit it’s bearing. Thus, always make sure you are tracking the performance of your employees. You can easily monitor how well your employee is performing or how effective your training is with the help of a learning management system.
When you measure the success of your training, it becomes easier for you to find the areas of improvement. You will also understand where you can improve your approach or where you think you have added content that is irrelevant.
Conclusion
There are several benefits that come from reskilling your workforce. You just need to make sure everything goes right when you are doing that!
