Upskills and reskill initiatives for your workforce
In modern work environments, it is important for employers and individual employees to adapt to keep up with the speed of change. In many cases, this means that you can develop your skills continuously. It may sound like workplace learning equivalent to hamster wheels, but it doesn’t have to feel like that effort. Technology within modern LMS creates a set of opportunities to offer high-end and reskilling initiatives.
What are upskills and reskills?
Upskilling is learning that employees will either improve their performance in their current roles or develop additional skills that will help them advance their career paths.
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Reskills are learning to allow employees to develop new skills outside their existing skill sets and move to alternative career paths.
Initiatives for Upskills and Reskills using LMS
There are many upskills and reskilling initiatives that can be implemented using LMS. Some of the best examples are:
Skill gap analysis
Using LMS for skill gap analysis is an obvious starting point for upskills and reskills. A solid understanding of where organizational gaps lie can be achieved by implementing targeted upskills and reskilling initiatives that benefit the organization and its employees.
For organizations, you can create tailored learning programs that quickly and effectively close down skills deficiencies. For individuals within an organization, they can guide them towards skill development that supports career progression. How learners can help them improve their engagement and morale by taking on specific training, helping them to advance their promotions, new roles, or different career paths.
Additionally, the LMS reporting system allows you to monitor the progress of initiatives that close the skills gap. This allows you to pivot into new or emerging skills gaps.
Social learning
Social or peer-to-peer learning is one of the most valuable ways to get high-end skiing and reskilling. Informal learning from colleagues accounts for the overwhelming majority of workplace learning. Using LMS to encourage and build social learning can have great benefits for organizations.
LMS forums, webinars and workspace features can all be deployed to support upskills and reskills. Content curated and shared by in-house experts and thought leaders can help spread skills throughout the organization and break down knowledge silos. Social learning tools can also capture peer feedback within the LMS. This will help employees, managers and L&D leaders understand individual reskilling opportunities.
Staff retention
Recruitment is expensive and time-consuming, so skilled and reskilling initiatives that encourage people to stay in your organization are invaluable. Your LMS can help in several ways in this regard. First, many learning platforms are based on competency frameworks. By linking competence to specific roles, you can map learners’ career paths. By sharing with them, you can target high-class and reskills in ways that help employees see career growth opportunities.
Even introducing high-end skills and reskilling opportunities and thus demonstrating commitments to development can be a factor that encourages staff retention. Reskill initiatives in particular help to maintain unfortunate staff or to maintain staff who are not looking for a long-term future in their current roles. LMS provides infrastructure that helps people move to completely different career paths without leaving the organization.
LMS can also play a key role in reducing recruitment costs. L&D data can be used to designate internal recruitment candidates with the skills needed to play a vacant role.
Leadership Development
Managerial and leadership roles were once distributed based on experience and longevity. With LMS you can only go to people with the leadership skills needed to thrive in these roles.
Implementing a Leadership Development Program at LMS will help you expand your future leaders. By adjusting the roles and specific capabilities of each leadership within the organization, candidates can ensure all the skills needed for a particular position.
This is a very useful reskilling initiative. It requires people with subject knowledge in a particular field and equips leadership skills equally important for success as managers. Equally important highlights those who do not have the aptitude to be a leader.
Personalized learning pathways
Without a doubt, the personalized learning pathways that are the most important of all the high-skilling and reskilling opportunities we outline will allow you to tailor opportunities for each employee. This can be guided by skill gap analysis, career progression opportunities, or opinions from employees themselves. In any case, LMS allows you to easily automate learning paths that are customized to the results you need.
As we have established, your LMS is based on a competency framework that links specific skills to each role. This allows you to automate tailored pathways that meet individual career goals while tailoring them to broader business goals. The fact that employees work through personalized programs designed to help them progress also drives L&D engagement.
A culture of continuous learning
An important initiative in promoting high-publication and reskilling is to create a workplace culture where skill development is the norm. A notable example of this is Google’s 20% policy. This means that employees can devote a fifth of their time to projects that are interested or excited.
Your LMS will help you build a learning culture. Bicycle-sized microlearning helps to incorporate L&D into normal workdays so that it becomes part of the standard rather than another activity. LMS can also be used to reward learning through badges, certificates, and gamification elements. This increases engagement levels and supports skilled targets and reskilling goals.
Conclusion
LMS is an important tool for creating, delivering and monitoring upskills and reskilling initiatives. By combining all the features and capabilities available in LMS with the organization’s objectives, e-learning can be used to develop people with the skills the organization needs. Delivered in the right way, this will support high-level business goals, individual career ambitions and staff retention.
Synergy Learning LMS
Award-winning LMS platform. Totara Platinum and Moodle Premium Partners create great learning platforms for your organization to reduce training costs, increase employee retention, and promote critical training and compliance.
