Effective Upskilling Pedagogy: Secret To Retaining Talent And Preventing Turnover

Skills, in the current IT ecosystem, are valuable commodities for any organisation, and it is no surprise that upskilling today has become a crucial tool to address the challenges related to employee retention. While the IT sector witnessed anemployee turnover rate of ~14% in 2018, it is estimated that only 40% companies have undertaken any initiatives that can improve retention. Moreover, it has recently come out that losing an employee can cost an organisation upto $25,000, and the figure increases when you start considering more variables. It is in response to this, the World Economic Forum recently stated that managing skills in the digital age requires organizations to harness technology that enables them to deploy a data-driven approach to lifelong learning and smarter upskilling.

So, what does this all mean? Upskilling today has become more of a tool where businesses engage and successfully retain their valuable employee while moving them to the next level. 

Organisations that facilitates or supports upskilling opportunities for their employees stand a better chance to cope with the short-lived technological advancements which forces organisations to upgrade their infrastructure and their workforce at short intervals.It is necessary for both the organisation, and its workforce, to go above and beyond by facilitating upskilling via training programs that can be tailor-made to establish a healthy learning ecosystem. 

Upskillingwith an effective learning ecosystem

Personalized learning and development plans

When it comes to devising anupskilling strategy, business should start understanding each employee’s role instead of treating them as a group. This helps them redefine the significance of learning resources and path to be used for a particular employee.

Business can leverage an intelligent learning platform to help them to predict such results and automate resource recommendations based on previous performances and goals assigned to employees. For instance, if an employee not performing well assessments gets recommended with a video that explains the particular concept. The platform also identifies the most engaging resource type (e-books, webinars, offline videos, assessments) consumed by each learner and aligns the future recommendation based on them.

Ease of access to digital resources

Easy access to learning resources makes it convenient for learners to pull relevant reading materials at whatever time they want it, helping them learn at their own pace. Supplemental learning resources like videos, e-books, presentations, webinars etc. are crucial for learners who struggle to catch up with or miss regular sessions and rely on such resources to comprehend what they missed.

To enable this, organisations simply need to leverage a dynamic, robust learning management platform could also automate resource recommendation and delivery based on alearner’s performance and assessments. This helps businesses ideate a learning environment where the LMS can predict and re-adjust learning paths of learners based on their learning speed and preference of learning resources. 

Including real-life scenarios in learning strategies

Businesses can bring their upskilling goals to life by including multiple decisive use cases within the organisation into the learning strategy. Learners can be asked to analyse the problem statement, give feedback and offer improvement insights on the particular use cases. It ensures that learners employ the right concepts and put their skills into practice with a guided approach.

Hands-on experience and gamification

Upskilling activities are deemed ineffective if learners lack practical application of skills they learn. Aligning learning towards real life case studies, industry sized projects and gamified modules help learners practice their skill sets rather than memorising concepts (which is sadly the story of formal corporate learning modules today). Modern learners wanta learning experience where they can achieve milestones, get recognized and can socialize at anytime. They feel empowered if they can access learning resources when they want to, instead of having resources pushed upon them. 

Upskilling practices should not be generalized as this can be overwhelming for learners. This is also important because learners usually have different learning abilities and habits. The best practice in such scenarios is to understand the existing skill gap among the employees and develop a customized curriculum that aligns to the needs of everylearner, systematically integrating previously acquired sills with new ones, and allowing them to apply what they’ve learned. 

In the backdrop of digital transformation, providing the right opportunities to skill your workforce holds the key to the success of an organization. Organisations should help employees grow by encouraging a culture of continuous learning to help employees remain competitive with peers, develop more refined skills, and meet everyday tasks in a better manner. It is up to the company to encourage a continuous learning culture in the workplace by providing various learning opportunities. As the pressure to improve learning and development opportunities continues to intensify, those charged with skills progression will develop new ways to empower employees and offer opportunities to grow within the business.