How To Upskill Your Employee As Per Work Need

Having a skilled workforce is ideal for an employer in any industry, and it can reap lots of benefits, ranging from an increased capacity to handle complex projects to an improved team problem-solving function.

But education doesn’t have to stop when someone enters a job, and as an employer, you’re in a position to encourage your workers to pick up extra skills. From training days to additional degrees, there are many options. Here are some of the major routes you can take.

5 Ways to upskill of your employee

Here are the top 5 ways using which you can upskill your staff as per the demand of the industry and work. For example, earlier we were dealing with small data and so relational databases were good but with the increase in data, big data needed to come in the picture. And so, to handle such a huge amount of data, we need employees skilled in big data. So, it will be a good practice to upskills your employee in the newly developed or upcoming area to manage the demand and competition.

There is another benefit of employee upskilling as well- If you will upskill your employee, they will think they are also growing as per the need of the industry and will think that the organization is taking care of their growth. This will help you reduce the attrition rate a lot.

Now let's start what are the ways using which you can upskill your employee for win-win situation.

Night classes

No employer can dictate to their employees what they do outside of the set working hours, of course. But what employers can do is point their staff in the direction of great ideas for professional and self-development, and night classes at a local community college constitute a good place to begin. Why not consider putting up a notice in the staff room with a list of available courses and contact details on it, or even asking a member of the college’s outreach team to come in and speak to your workers?

Training days

Most people who have ever worked in an office or indeed any organization will be familiar with the concept of a workplace training day. As an employer, these tend to be encouraged for one of two possible reasons: either to meet some kind of expected standard (such as first aid or fire safety) or to train staff in the use of a specific tool.

If you’re a little concerned about how much your employees are going to get out of a training day spent sitting in a room in the office, you may want to consider going off-site and adding that novelty factor in a hotel or other location – providing that matches your budget, of course.

Additional degrees

For those employers who are very committed to the idea of further education, providing time or even some financial support for additional degrees is also an option. Except in cases where established promotion routes rely on gaining an extra degree (or where there is also a similar level of commitment and dedication from the employee in question), employees may not have even thought about doing an extra degree – so making the path as simple as possible will help them see the advantages.

Say you’re based in upstate New York and are thinking about colleges in Buffalo NY for your workers: pairing up with a local Buffalo campus is a smart move, as it will be convenient and easy for them to reach. Sending round-robin emails with generic links to university sites may be met with confusion, and it could even backfire if someone resigns to pursue studies out of state.

Online Courses

Online courses are a great source of education nowadays. When people are unable to manage extra time for full-time education or classroom education, you can definitely compensate those with the help of online learning. Almost all the leading universities in the world are offering online part-time programs and you can get your employee registered with it. Even you can get them some short-term courses on some specific website specialized in that area.

For example, if you are looking to build a workforce to handle large amounts of data, you can register your colleague for online Hadoop developer training and get them skilled. This will not only save time but also resources.

Cross-technical Training

This is the most economical and beneficial way of upskilling your employee. Let's say you have two teams one for manual testing while the other for automated testing. As manual testing is getting least in demand and so you may want your manual tester resources upskilled with automated testing.

 So, you can arrange cross-technical training where your skilled team will provide the training to the team want to onboard. This way, you won't have to spend on the training and also get your employees to know each other.

Wrapping it up!

Having an educated workforce is always a shrewd move as it gives your business a competitive edge, and taking steps to achieve this is something every employer should be encouraging. From traditional options such as employee training days to going as far as helping your people get further degrees, there are many ways to help your staff develop.