It is essential to value each member of your team, especially during these difficult times. Finding new skilled members are proving to be difficult with the restrictions and circumstances that this pandemic has brought. This causes your team to have an unfilled gap because of the lack of skilled members.  Luckily, the solution is actually quite simple.

Every successful company’s greatest resource is its variety of skilled employees. Investing in the development of your existing team members’ skill will become important to heightening your team’s productivity. Upskilling your team members will help them to be more familiar with each other as well as enhance their skills and efficiency in their jobs. 

Crafting the perfect plan to upskill your team members is a difficult task that could easily go wrong; however, with enough time and the right resources, these skill gaps will disappear in no time. 

Creating your Upskilling goals

The most important thing to do in order to create an effecting upskilling process is to establish your goals.  Setting goals for both yourself and your existing employees will help visualize what is trying to be achieved. 

If you are unsure of where to start, it’s recommended that you set goals for the improvement of your services or product, your team working as a whole, and the individual employees. Discussing and establishing these goals to your team will help direct the path to upskilling and a strategy along the way.

Why your learning management system is not effective

  1. Not allowing further development. Learning new skills is very important. Many learning management systems (LMS) are made to train new employees which are often limited to their tasks instead of growth. This only allows the employee to grow within the small areas of responsibilities. Additionally, the usual LMS are generalized for all employees instead of personally training them based on their individual capabilities.
  2. Helping with Career paths. The usual learning management systems do not aid an employee on their individual career directions. These systems do not facilitate the skills that your team members may need at certain stages in their development.
  3. Lack of continuous training. Typical learning management systems are not able to incorporate essential training throughout work for employees. These are usually one-time training that are only given when starting out in their employment.  This lack of consistency often causes more harm in terms of upskilling costs to companies long-term.
  4. Hindered by the lack of resources. The current learning management systems only provide employees in the simplest way. Because of this limitation, their learning is not developed to the best of their potential. Development becomes slow and hindered since the proper training for each individual worker is not provided. It is best if your team members are given the resources to more information as well as training that is relevant for future progress. This way, your employee will be able to perform tasks in fields more efficiently from when they started.

How to upskill team members

Like most problems, upskilling your team members also has its solutions. Here are a few steps in your journey to successfully upskilling your employees.

  1. Assess the skill gap. It is essential that you first audit the general skills and competencies of each individual work before anything else. You must pinpoint which fields require to need more skilled and competent employees.  This will allow you to understand the necessary competencies and workforce that the company will require. Furthermore, you can determine which team members need further development and how to maximize their skills.
  2. Create a proper training schedule.  You must consider all that allocating training time for each employee is the key to effective upskilling. Even if it may seem quite a handful, It Is better for your team members to engage in training when it is most convenient for them. This allows for a better relationship between you and your coworkers. Whether you decide to take time out of work hours daily or set aside one specific day for training, this schedule will be based on your own assessment.
  3. Employees should have personal development plans. Although you are likely to have a rough idea of the adjustments you want to make, your employees will most likely have a better overview of what areas they want to improve.  If you want to save time and be more efficient, you can leave each team member to develop and assess their own skills voluntarily. You will still need to facilitate their progress to ensure that what they will learn is parallel to your goals.
  4. Evaluate. You have accomplished your upskilling and development; however, you still have to figure out if the progress being made fills that skill gap. This will require you to actively keep track of the development being made as well as their overall performance at their tasks. You could also require them to make reports to you or your managers to understand what areas may need help and what action should be taken.

It is also essential that you encourage the development of internal talent mobility as a guide and final step for them in upskilling.

Useful tools for upskilling your team

If you seem to have a difficult time keeping track of the upskilling process, then it would be good for you to invest in tools to make things more efficient and easy.

  1. Gloat. https://www.gloat.com/ is a great place to start to optimize your learning management system. Gloat allows you to easily navigate and glide through the upskilling process. It allows its clients to understand the relationships between roles and skills which provides its users with development opportunities.
  2. GoToTraining. GoToTraining allows its users to use video training. If you ever need to conduct meetings overseas and have scheduled meetings, this website provides just what you need. The site even incorporates Youtube and Vimeo which you may link in your meetings.
  3. Bloomfire. Bloomfire allows you to centralize knowledge such as training documents. After their training, members can manage their upskilling files so that everyone may be able to view them.

Conclusion

Upskilling is an essential tool for filling gaps in your company’s skill. With the right information and resources, you can make existing team member’s play a bigger role in your organization. The development of your employees’ skills will become the point of success and better service for your company.

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