Accelerate upskilling to drive sustainability

The world of work continues to evolve at an increasingly fast pace. New skills are in demand. Others are becoming obsolete. The days of the nine to five office routine seem numbered.

Government sponsored programmes such as Apprenticeships have the potential to provide businesses with the skills of the future, but are often bureaucratic, behind the curve and focussed on first time entrants to the workforce.

For businesses without in-house learning and development expertise, the challenge becomes how to effect these changes in the most cost and time effective manner.

When considering workforce upskilling, we have identified seven factors that sit at the heart of effective programmes:

1.       Recognise the latent skills in your existing workforce

2.       Understand skills demand outside of job / role-based requirements

3.       Make learning activities easily accessible

4.       Create short activities that support continued learning

5.       Maximise opportunities for informal learning

6.       Focus attention on lower skilled and older workers

7.       Invest in high quality teaching staff for face-to-face delivery

Our experience shows that shorter learning modules that foster curiosity and creativity can have the greatest impact and help build confidence in learning abilities amongst those with lower levels of previous educational attainment.

Blending technology and face-to-face learning activities sits at the heart of these strategies. Technology alone is not the answer.

By combining these aspects with reinforcement over time, organisations can accelerate the speed at which their current workforce reskill to meet future challenges.

For a helping hand to get started, our workforce development team can help you explore ways to inject new skills and behaviours into your workforce and ultimately improve the sutainability of your organisations future.