Although the terms upskill and reskill are used interchangeably, they are not the same.
What does upskill mean?
Upskilling involves evaluating an employee’s existing skills and helping them to advance in their current role. It helps facilitate continuous learning by providing training opportunities to develop employee skills. Upskilling refers to cultivating a worker’s skillset to help them excel in their current role.
It can involve refining either soft skills or technical skills to fill workplace gaps. For instance, emotional intelligence is a soft skill that can be honed in leadership roles. Similarly, technical skills are needed in many manufacturing positions. Working with technology is a must as companies automate more and more of their operations.
An HR representative with data analytics experience, for example, can hone their skills to take on more specialized tasks. This can consist of taking a class to gain more knowledge or attending a virtual conference to learn about industry-specific technology.
Upskilling staff can help your business stay on top of industry trends and pivot in an ever-changing digital landscape.
What is reskilling?
Reskilling involves learning new skills to move on to a new role within a company. It’s also a cost-effective alternative to hiring new employees.
For example, an electrician may have excellent planning and job estimation skills. The organization could choose to reskill that worker to an estimation position instead of hiring someone from the outside.
Or an employer could reskill a production assembler to work as a maintenance technician. The new role may require taking a series of training courses and completing certain safety classes or certifications.
Half of all workers will need to be upskilled by 2025 as more jobs become digitized, according to the World Economic Forum. Workers will take on more critical thinking and problem-solving roles, leaving technical tasks to artificial intelligence and machine learning. Furthermore, the growing skilled labor gap in manufacturing has created a workforce shortage, and upskilling and training are becoming necessary to ensure production capacity is met.
Upskilling and reskilling employees are efficient ways to retain a workforce. Both provide opportunities to help workers grow and advance skills. Learn how to upskill and reskill staff with the following steps.
Upskilling Manufacturing Workers
Step 1: Assess Current Skills It all begins by understanding the current skillset of your employees. The best way to accomplish this is through a skills matrix which digitizes and tracks the existing skills across your organization. According to a study by Deloitte, companies that actively measure and map employee skills are 45% more likely to uncover latent talent and skills gaps in their organizations.
Step 2: Identify Future Skills After assessing current employee skills, you need to identify the skills crucial for future growth and business continuity. Gartner’s Future of Work Trends post-pandemic report reveals that 68% of leading businesses prioritized the identification of future skills as a key strategy for maintaining a competitive edge.
Step 3: Set Upskilling Goals These goals should be employee-specific and aligned with the future needs of your business. For instance, you may want each worker to undertake training courses pertinent to their job-specific skills.
Step 4: Introduce New Learning Opportunities Make provision for suitable training and development opportunities that can help your workers enhance their skills. According to LinkedIn’s 2021 Workplace Learning Report, 94% of employees say they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development.
Step 5: Monitor Progress With a clear understanding of existing skills and future needs, it’s crucial to monitor the progress made. Tools that digitally track employee skills can provide a clear image of proficiency gaps and upskilling opportunities.
Reskilling Manufacturing Workers
Step 1: Identify Skills for Cultivation Ascertain the most valuable skills and develop training programs for those skills. This should also include the creation of new roles.
Step 2: Implement Upskilling Start training employees and offering resources to improve their skills. This could be training on digital tools or specific equipment that aligns with potential promotion opportunities.
Step 3: Customize Learning Plan Create a bespoke plan of core learning opportunities for the skillsets needed now or in the future. This can enhance the effectiveness of the reskilling initiative.
Step 4: Test and Adjust Creating a flawless reskilling plan on the first attempt is challenging. Be ready to learn from mistakes and make necessary adjustments.
Step 5: Invest in Budget Allocating financial resources for reskilling employees is crucial for business growth. A report by PwC reveals that 74% of companies plan to increase their spend on reskilling programs in the coming years.
Benefits of upskilling and reskilling manufacturing employees
Workplace roles are changing and expanding in the age of automation. This change can bring about skill gaps that need to be filled for a business to stay ahead of the curve.
Upskilling and reskilling manufacturing employees has several long-term benefits for employers, such as:
- Boosts retention. Investing in your employees’ skills development fosters better relationships. Workers who feel valued are less likely to leave. Improving retention can save businesses money on hiring and training new workers.
- Improves morale. Businesses that offer training and development opportunities help their workers grow and move forward in the company. This can help employees feel like they’re working toward something and not staying stagnant within the company.
- Improves quality and productivity. Beyond retention and morale improvement, upskilling and reskilling can have production benefits. A more skilled and trained workforce can result in improved quality, productivity, and efficiency throughout your organization.
So How Can We Help You…
Whenever you’re ready to grow and expand your Engineering and Manufacturing teams, here are 3 ways that we can help:
1. We help attract and retain Mechanical, Electrical, Manufacturing, Automation/PLC, Process, and Quality Engineers and the frontline leaders for their teams.
2. Reduce the cost of acquiring and training new hires by supporting and enhancing the efforts of your onboarding team for the first 90 days.
3. Provide a zero-risk and no-cost assessment of your hiring strategies with a 15-minute consultation:
