Consider the following scenario: You're falling behind your competitors in terms of digital transformation, and you're scared that startups with large amounts of financing may overtake you. You're attempting to make progress, but your budget won't allow you to recruit enough engineers, product owners, cyber experts, design thinkers, data scientists, or agile coaches. They prefer entertaining, young businesses to old-school businesses that lack dynamic approaches, command-and-control bosses, and matrix systems that stifle decision-making.
Simultaneously, many of your current employees are performing tasks that are becoming outdated as a result of automation. Furthermore, you have too many inefficient middle managers, and your frontline personnel are unprepared for the future due to their lack of digital training.
Is this something you've already heard? These are the concerns that many of our clients have, and they reflect where we are in the global skills crisis. More than half of all employees globally will need to upskill or reskill by 2025 to keep up with the changing nature of work, according to the World Economic Forum. Many firms are looking to reskilling to produce the skills they can't locate or deploy effectively in these scenarios. Despite this, "talent and skills" is the second-most underinvested sector in corporate transformation efforts, according to a 2020 worldwide BCG poll.
We provide six practical lessons based on BCG's extensive experience aiding more than 100 customers globally, affecting hundreds of thousands of learners in the last four years, as businesses reimagine how they bring learning to thousands of people at a rapid pace.
Six methods for upskilling your workforce
1. View talent development as a business investment rather than a cost
The majority of skilling projects fail because they are designed to cut learning and development (L&D) costs rather than provide significant financial gains. Globally, more than $300 billion is spent on corporate education each year, according to Allied Market Research. In our experience dealing with customers, the bulk of corporate education initiatives have no measurable impact.
Skilling should be viewed as a long-term business investment, with well-defined business, people, and learning KPIs as a starting point for programme design.
For example, an Asian real estate firm creating a leadership development programme established the end business objectives: a 50% faster time to new market entry and a two-fold increase in land purchase target attainment through faster decision making.
This completely changed the architecture of the L&D intervention. The business used to hold a series of assisted leadership and decision-making courses. Participants were instead led through a hands-on learning intervention in which they were shadowed and taught how to conduct their monthly business review meetings differently in order to achieve their objectives. They witnessed a considerable increase in market share as a result, as well as a successful initiative to cascade down to their middle management.
2. Provide "salads" for healthy skill development
Employees are frequently given a menu of "main course" skilling options to choose from, such as functional, digital, leadership, business, or soft skills. According to our findings, the greatest way to achieve high-impact reskilling is to create tasty "salads" that mix all of these competencies in a specific setting.
The Harvard Business Review and the Singapore government partnered on a large-scale workforce reskilling effort to help mid-career professionals make the shift from traditional jobs to data and digital ones. The curriculum must cover a broad range of skills, including problem-solving, insight development, and analytics, as well as soft skills such as stakeholder involvement and communication.
3. Restore the passion of studying
Too much time is spent using e-modules or Zoom sessions to incorporate learning. Learning experience designers must redefine how, when, and where learning takes place with a leading question in mind, with the goal of bringing the thrill and wonder of learning that children experience to adult learners.
Instead of just giving case studies on customer centricity, a leading Chinese mobile phone company brought real customers to their learning sessions, resulting in the busting of numerous myths and the production of new business insights. A big consumer goods company in India used selfie films to teach their mid-level managers how to communicate. In comparison to the traditional method of receiving feedback from a facilitator, this resulted in participants feeling more self-aware of how they interact. A global public sector organisation was able to immerse middle managers in and understand the agile manner of working by first duplicating frequent work scenarios in "command-and-control" mode and then recreating the same scenarios in "autonomy-and-alignment" mode.
4. Use data to your advantage
Learning design and delivery is both a science and an art. Data-driven decision-making can help at every stage of the learning process.
AI systems, for example, can look at a worker's job history and career path to discover skill gaps and customise their learning experience. These algorithms can also predict migration patterns for groups of people whose jobs are going to be significantly disrupted to in-demand jobs. Another option is to do A/B tests for different cohorts on different programme formats or learning modalities and let the data drive the decisions as the programmes expand. Finally, tracking outcomes over time using both leading and lagging indicators can aid in the improvement of skilling programmes.
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benefits of upskilling, upskill your employees, digital transformation
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