What is Upskilling? A Guide to Growing Your Employees Skillset

When everything’s said and done, you hire employees for their skills. While in some industries it’s normal to train an employee up to a certain level soon after hiring them, most companies expect a certain baseline from day one. But unless you work in a completely static industry, your teams will need to build up existing skills or acquire new ones over time. That makes upskilling essential unless you’re planning to hire every time you find a skill gap.

An organization-wide upskilling strategy that makes learning available to employees to teach them new skills or improve existing ones can create a culture of ongoing learning that keeps you ready to face anything.

In this guide, you’ll learn everything there is to know about upskilling, including how to deploy your own upskilling strategy using tools like 15Five Transform.

Key takeaways

• Through upskilling, companies help employees build up their skills and learn new complementary ones.
• Providing upskilling opportunities helps with employee engagement and retention.
• Deploying an upskilling strategy means making learning resources available, supporting employees through their learning journey, and constantly improving your process.
• While leaders often cite budget and change as reasons to resist upskilling initiatives, the benefits vastly outweigh the risks.

Understanding upskilling

Upskilling is exactly what it says on the tin: upgrading your skills. From an employee perspective, it means improving existing skills and learning new ones to either get better at a current role or move up the career track. From the perspective of the organization, upskilling means training your existing workforce to meet skill gaps instead of hiring new talent.

While learning a new skill can be as simple as reading a book or taking a course, an organization-wide upskilling strategy goes a little further than that. It needs to proactively identify opportunities for upskilling and help employees rise to new challenges while seeing a return on investment (ROI) on the resources spent to train these skills.

It’s partly about having a more skilled workforce and partly about fostering career development for employees to make them feel more fulfilled at work.

Upskilling vs. reskilling

Upskilling is about building up your skill set to be better at your current job or take on more responsibility. Compare this to reskilling, which is about learning completely new skills to take on a new role.

A software developer learning a new programming language is upskilling. If that same developer learns how to manage software projects to aim for a role as a product or project manager, then they’re reskilling.

Upskilling is typically less resource-intensive and more valuable to your organization than reskilling. It takes a lot less time and effort to upgrade existing skills or learn similar ones than it does to learn a completely new role.

Next, let’s see why organizations should put significant resources into upskilling their employees.

The Benefits of Upskilling Employees

Employees might get a ton of benefits from your upskilling strategy, from career opportunities to a greater sense of belonging at work, but this strategy benefits your organization, too. Here’s how:

• Enhanced employee performance: Seems obvious, right? By putting resources into helping employees build up their skills, they’ll be better at their jobs. You won’t just see this in hard numbers either. More skilled employees can help you unlock new opportunities you’d never have found otherwise.
• Increased employee engagement: Data from Axonify shows that a vast majority of workers (92%) say that the right kind of training makes them feel more engaged with their work. If boosting engagement is a big priority for your organization, then upskilling should be, too.
• Talent retention: According to a survey of 1,600 professionals from edX, 77% of employees said they were more likely to stay with their employer longer with a better learning and development program. Considering how hard (and expensive) replacing an employee can be, your upskilling strategy can be a huge cost-saving initiative.
• Talent attraction: Having a robust upskilling strategy means you can offer new hires learning and development opportunities that help them stay current in their field. For many candidates, that’s a huge bonus.
• Business growth and adaptability: Having a more skilled workforce means you’ll be crushing more goals, finding new growth opportunities, and getting prepared for anything your industry might throw at you.

Upskilling is a win-win for organizations and employees that pays dividends for years. But many organizations still don’t have a robust strategy for implementing this, likely because at first glance the investment seems to outweigh the benefits.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

So let’s cover how it’s done, both at an employee and organizational level.

How to Upskill Employees

When you get into the nitty-gritty of upskilling employees, it boils down to just a few steps:

• Find learning opportunities.
• Provide the resources employees need to learn.
• Offer continuous feedback and support.
• Monitor their progress.
• Celebrate their achievements.
• Rinse and repeat.

Seems simple, right?

Find learning opportunities

The first step to helping employees level up their skills? Finding out which skills need the help. Prioritize opportunities that mesh with the organization’s goals, but leave room to listen to employees and learn what they’re interested in learning.

Provide the resources employees need to learn

Core to your upskilling efforts is making the whole process easier for your employees. For some organizations, that might just mean subsidizing learning by making industry-specific books and training available to them for free. For others, it’ll mean having a dedicated learning platform with pre-approved courses and content matching specific roles. The latter involves a more significant investment but offers more standardization across departments.

Offer continuous feedback and support

Managers have a big role to play in upskilling. By closely following an employee’s learning and giving them opportunities to put what they learn to the test, managers can make or break an upskilling journey. Feedback will keep employees headed in the right direction, while support will encourage them to push their limits.

Monitor progress

While a manager can support and guide someone on their team as they learn a new skill, you should have another method of tracking an employee’s progress toward their upskilling goals, too. Dedicated learning tools can usually allow you to track specific metrics to gauge how employees are doing. If you’re not using these, regular check-ins on a specific course or book can be enough.

Celebrate achievements

Don’t skip this step. It might seem like an afterthought, but celebrating employees when they hit their learning goals motivates them to keep learning while encouraging others to start their own learning journey. This can be as simple as having a dedicated Slack channel celebrating upskilling wins as they happen. You might even want to highlight these achievements in an all-hands meeting.

Rinse and repeat

Your upskilling process probably won’t be an all-star winner the first go-around. The first employees who take advantage of this new benefit can—and should—have a hand in helping you shape it. Ask them for their feedback as they learn. Is the content you’re providing clear? Is it actually helping them achieve their goals? What would they like to see the next time they need to learn something?

Implementing an Upskilling Strategy

Working with employees to level up their skills is one thing; rolling out an upskilling strategy across your entire organization is another. Here are some things to keep in mind as you’re working on your own strategy.

Set clear goals

Just like your employees, your strategy needs to have its own goals. Are you aiming to improve performance across the board? Do you have serious skill gaps in a specific department that need to be addressed?

Some upskilling strategies might only have short-term goals aimed at fixing a few glaring problems. Others are long-term investments meant to keep improving the entire workforce’s skills over time. Either way, it’s best to set these goals in stone before you build out the rest of your strategy.

Seek buy-in (and feedback) from stakeholders

Just like you need to set goals early, you need to get buy-in from relevant stakeholders early. If the HR team is already on board, you’ll next need to get the C-suite involved. They usually control the purse strings and can give the green light on these initiatives. To get the buy-in you need, you have to show how upskilling ties directly into business goals. Here are a few ideas:

• “Putting more effort into helping existing employees grow means less budget spent hiring replacements because they’re less likely to leave.”
• “Promoting internally for management means having managers with a deep understanding of our culture. Upskilling is essential for that.”
• “We currently have a few skill gaps keeping us from hitting our next goals. That’s why we need an upskilling strategy.”

Once you have buy-in, you can also rely on stakeholders to give you feedback as you work on your strategy. Executives, managers, and even individual employees are all great sources for this feedback.

Download The Executive Buy-in Playbook: Getting C-Suite Support For Your Strategic HR Initiatives

Try to tie learning goals with the organization’s goals

Baked into your strategy should be a framework for determining which learning goals deserve the most investment. Ideally, upskilling employees should serve both the employee and the organization equally by developing skills essential to its growth. This isn’t always possible, however, and in some cases you’ll have to allow employees to pursue less important learning goals to improve their overall engagement and help them make progress in their own careers.

Use the right tools

Simpler upskilling strategies might not need dedicated tools; it might be enough to allow employees to order relevant business books through your accounting department. But if you want an in-depth upskilling strategy with an impact that’s inherently measurable and provable, you need a tool like 15Five.

15Five is a performance management platform that also supports your upskilling initiatives with content, coaching, and metrics for measuring progress. Curious to see how it works? Book a demo with our team.

Find ways to encourage participation

Some employees will make the most of an upskilling opportunity without much encouragement. Others, not so much. For this latter group, you’ll have to work on ways to incentivize them. That could be by tying promotion opportunities with upskilling, giving small bonuses to people who complete more learning goals, or even just giving away gift cards when employees take on a new learning opportunity.

Keep track of progress

If you’re using a dedicated performance management platform like 15Five, you’ll have a range of metrics you can use to track progress as employees learn. If you’re not, you’ll still want to use KPIs (key performance indicators) to monitor how upskilling is improving things at your organization.

Make ongoing learning part of your culture

This requires more of a long-term investment, but making ongoing learning part of your company’s culture comes with some serious benefits:

• Reducing resistance to upskilling initiatives.
• Turning more employees into self-directed learners.
• Attracting top talent.
• Getting more buy-in for future upskilling initiatives.

So, how do you make ongoing learning part of your culture? Reward employees who seek out learning opportunities and encourage your C-suite to share their own learning journeys with the company. Reinforce the importance of learning as a solution to every potential problem, and people will start to catch on.

How to Overcome Common Challenges with Upskilling

Having a robust upskilling strategy comes with a ton of benefits, but it isn’t always the easiest thing to get off the ground. You’ll have to deal with challenges common with any new HR initiative.

Budget constraints

Even the simplest upskilling strategies require a significant investment, which can have budget-minded leaders hitting the kill switch early.

As an HR pro, you need to clearly outline the benefits of upskilling in ways your leadership team can understand. Statistics can show how other organizations like yours are seeing results from upskilling while showing the projected ROI of your strategy can help ease any budget concerns.

Resistance to change

Our brains love to stick with what they know even when a different strategy would serve them better. The best way to counter this? Lower the stakes. A pilot project lets you take your first steps in rolling out your upskilling strategy with a smaller team, meaning a smaller investment and a smaller change. Even the most change-resistant leader will have a hard time saying no.

Balancing work and learning

If you expect employees to do all of their upskilling work outside their 9-5, you’re probably not going to get a lot of takers. Provide a way for employees to contribute to their learning during work hours—even if just for a few minutes each day.

Making it a Priority

When you find skill gaps in your organization, it’s tempting to just throw a job posting out there and hope that fixes the problem. But with the costs involved in finding, training, and retaining new talent, you’ll often get better results when you look inward.

Not only will you plug the skill gaps, but you’ll also improve employee engagement and help with retention. Better yet, upskilling also allows existing employees to get more out of their jobs and feel like they’re making progress in their careers.