What is reskilling?
Discover what reskilling means, why it is important to allow your employees to reskill, and how employee reskilling affects your organisation.
- Reskilling means learning new skills so you can do a different job.
- Reskilling can be achieved through organisation-led training initiatives, peer-to-peer social learning, off-the-shelf elearning content or enrolling on courses.
- Reskilling is a major key to future proofing your employee skill portfolio. The increasing digitisation of the workforce means that 54% of all employees will require significant reskilling according to the World Economic Forum, so investing in reskilling should be a core part of an L&D department's plan for the future.
- Reskilling can also help increase employee morale, help fill skill gaps, excel at new areas of business and improve staff retention and acquisition.
- Reskilling is sometimes confused with upskilling. Upskilling is the act of levelling up your current skill set to advance in your current job role, whereas reskilling is learning new skills to enable you to take on a new role.
- Reskilling is also a way to avoid expensive recruitment costs and risks. By training a current employee to fill a job vacancy, you can make sure that the job vacancy is filled by someone who is both a culture fit, and trained to the standard you expect for the role.
- Sometimes reskilling can be an acceptable alternative to redundancy. By allowing an employee to move into a new role, you can keep someone who potentially doesn’t quite fit their current role but would excel if given a fresh start in a new team.
- Implementing reskilling initiatives is also a strategy to negate the effects of the Great Resignation. By offering your employees the opportunity to learn new skills and enter a new role within your organisation, you save the risk of them taking a role at another company that is more suited to their career aspirations.
