TiER1 Performance This article was co-authored by Anna Oskorus and Mike Divine, PhD.
Imagine the job you’re likely to have in five years doesn’t exist yet, and the job you’ll have in 10 years hasn’t been conceived yet. Many workers face this reality as businesses embark on digital transformations to integrate technology, data, systems, and people. To create new and improved capabilities that leverage and integrate the full power of digital networks, upskilling and reskilling employees is essential to help them adapt more fluidly to these challenges and prepare them for the future of work.
The Big Picture: Jobs will shift. Total jobs available may increase, but some roles will disappear or be replaced by new skills and higher skilled labor (e.g., software programming, 3D modeling, or machine learning).
For Frontline Employees: If change is the norm for organizations, employee tasks will change on a daily if not hourly basis, making adaptability a critical skill. The existing workforce will require both advanced instruction (upskilling) and introduction to entirely new disciplines (reskilling). Learning will need to adapt as quickly as processes to keep employees up to speed with technology.
For Leadership Teams: A compelling narrative attracts and retains talent. Frame digital transformation as an integral part of an exciting and energizing career path. A true culture shift in people-machine interactions requires a fundamental shift in how every level of the organization views the people-machine interface. Adjust structures of people in ways that complement the adaptable and network-based design of the future organization.
Align Leaders: Decide which aspects of digital transformation are high priority for the business. Continually orient leaders to the holistic set of priorities and which aspects are currently receiving focus and investment. Decision-making will require new streams of input from people and systems, requiring a higher level of transparency and feedback than is traditionally typical.
Communicate the Journey: Share the magnitude of the change to reduce the sense of threat. Prepare people for not just “a” change but for “continuous” change. Framing the change as a journey illustrates the value of ongoing change to the organization, employees, and customers, as well as what’s changing and why.
Map the Change: Many activities today need to radically change, including talent skillsets, behaviors, and disciplines. Determine and map the new skills or competencies needed for current and future roles. Additionally, plan how you will keep productivity consistent while implementing new technologies or competencies.
Learning: Provide continuous learning and onboarding to meet skill gaps and retain talent, including skills that are universal to the organization and role-specific skills.
Recruiting: Supplement the recruitment pipeline to prepare for new talent needs.
Labor Force Development: Establish training programs, apprenticeships, and public-private partnerships.
Systems: Invest in skills-based prescriptive learning systems that build skill profiles, identify skill gaps, accelerate learning, and provide content remediation.
Organization Design: Embed across the organization the ability to respond to constant change with agility.
To inspire your journey, here are some of our favorite examples of how we’ve improved the performance of people through reskilling and upskilling.
Insurance for the Future
A large insurance firm wanted to build a learning culture in which a growth mindset and continuous learning were part of the day-to-day expectations for employees. Existing learning opportunities were housed across multiple platforms that were cumbersome to access, and associates either weren’t aware of available opportunities or weren’t taking advantage of them. Partnering with senior leaders and associates, we created a best-in-class experience focused on performance and aligned to core competencies with flexibility for associates to chase passion areas that excited them. Associates could own their journey—choosing between pre-curated learning pathways or manually adding relevant courses to their learning plan—to upskill at a time and place convenient for them.
Focusing on the Customer
A major telecommunications firm was transforming frontline sales support, in part by implementing a new system to optimize the customer experience and reduce the complexity of the user interface for the salesforce. Thousands of frontline sales team members needed to be reskilled using the system to help them better serve customers. Due to the more intuitive and intelligent nature of the new system, precious training time could be reallocated: less time learning the point-and-click navigation in a software environment, and more time learning how to create great technology-enabled customer experiences to connect customers with more products and services and better meet their needs.
Accelerating Paths to Employment
A community college sought our help with creating an online two-year associate degree program in Instructional Design and Learning Technology to accelerate the path to employment for its students. They also wanted to train faculty members on the fundamentals of instructional design and provide an apprenticeship support model to build online degree programs going forward. We partnered with faculty members to define a curriculum focused on essential skills for new instructional designers, as well as coaching them through building excellent online courses of their own. The college gained an award-winning online degree program AND a team of reskilled faculty members ready to convert more online degree programs and help the college grow.
When implementing upskilling and reskilling solutions, it’s easy to let the big picture overwhelm you. One big challenge is that we just don’t know what’s to come. There are jobs and organizations of the future that don’t yet exist. Our advice is to start with small, lean experiments that you can learn from quickly and build upon overtime. And remember, you have to start somewhere. Let’s explore how we can develop the future workforce together!
While no perfect solution exists for any performance challenge, we specialize in helping our clients get unstuck, think deeply and efficiently about business challenges, and identify the best option for their situation. Click here for an opportunity to learn more about our collaborative process, or fill out the form at the bottom of the page to speak with someone on the TiER1 team.