Minimize reskilling costs and effort
Today’s work from home environment has caused a buzz about reskilling. Reskilling is the act of helping workers adjust to significant changes in their position or helping them into entirely new roles. As more and more industries become disrupted or altered by the pandemic, reskilling begins to look more like a necessity than an innovative step.
With the right planning and intentionality behind the training, reskilling can fuel a significant boost in your company’s success. Here are 3 tips to make your company’s reskilling successful:
1. Identify learner personas
Reskilling mainly refers to an existing set of employees. Therefore, it is safe to say that they have existing knowledge and skills that pertain to your company. During reskilling, this knowledge should be used to its full advantage. The first step is to identify learner personas.
You don’t want to spend time teaching an employee something they are already an expert in. Rather, that time and energy should be focused on reinforcing medium-level skills, addressing pitfalls and teaching new skills. Identifying and outlining learner personas will reveal what each employee’s strengths are and what their greatest pitfalls are. Not only will it ultimately cut the time then spent on training, it will make it so much more effective.
2. Make things clear
The key to success in reskilling is making things clear. Say your company has had to pivot and evolve many employee roles. New responsibilities and roles need to be clearly defined to avoid confusion. The outcome to reskilling should not be “now everyone does a little bit of everything.” It should be “now role A has evolved to role B” and so forth.
Making new roles clear is what will keep things running smooth. Without this integral step, workers will be confused about what they are responsible for and this will cause some things to just not get done. Moreover, other employees will be confused about who to go to with questions and tasks. Without this clarity, your team will slow down and begin moving backwards.
3. Utilize your experts
Today, companies are pivoting more than ever. In many cases, production and development departments are in need of extra support and employees are being transferred internally to add that support. Reskilling of these transferred employees is necessary and who better to provide the training than existing experts within the company?
Utilize your experts to share their knowledge for reskilling purposes. They are the best people to summarize the roles and responsibilities other employees need to learn to support the company’s shift. Ideally, you would package their knowledge into reusable videos or workbooks so that they are not taken away from what they do best. If the knowledge already exists in the company, why not document it?
Undoubtedly, reskilling can open a world of possibilities. Employees become fluent in new tasks and roles and gain more knowledge about the company. With the right planning and intentionality behind the training, reskilling can fuel a significant boost in your company’s success.
Enable Education is working hard to help businesses create sustainable training resources that can be used in the current working environment and once our world settles into a new normal. We can help you record professional training videos remotely, or create a sustainable plan that will guide your organization when things return to normal.
Contact ben@enableeducation.com to get started on your solution.
