Up-skilling: The Full Guide of Techniques

Up-skilling: The Full Guide on Ways to Up-skill your Workforce

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There are so many benefits to investing time and effort into up-skilling your workforce. Providing your employees with good learning and development opportunities improves engagement, makes people feel more valued, and develops new skills that will boost business productivity and performance.

When employees feel like they have progression opportunities at your business, they are less likely to apply for external jobs as they will feel they can achieve their career targets while working for you.

Up-skilling is also important for business continuity, for example, if one person is absent and they are the only person who usually does a specific task, another person who has been up-skilled on the task can step in during the absence.

Up-skilling your workforce can involve a wide range of activities and some of the most effective include:

1. Learning and development

Setting specific learning objectives as part of a performance management framework provides a structured approach, with employees having set goals to work towards. Regular performance meetings with a line manager or performance coach should be scheduled, where they discuss progress and provide support if required. The learning objectives could include doing online courses or learning a specified new skill that is relevant to their role or future progression to another role.

2. Job rotation

Another way to up-skill employees is to provide opportunities for job rotation. For example, someone working in the HR team could spend time working with the marketing team and vice versa. The bigger your business, the more opportunities to try different job roles but this can still work well with smaller teams.

3. Job enlargement

Job enlargement involves adding some more role responsibilities to an existing role to provide more scope for development. For example, in addition to admin duties, an administrator could get the opportunity to work on a project or could take responsibility for organising charity events or engagement activities.

4. Peer coaching

As well as learning from trainers in training courses and from people in more senior roles, many employees develop skills by learning from their peers. Peer coaching can be beneficial to both parties; one will learn new skills, while the other can get a sense of achievement by helping their peer. It can help to build stronger working relationships and also encourages collaborative working so teams are more productive.

5. Hire external experts

If you do not have an in-house learning and development team, you can use external experts such as Blue Lion Academy. They provide a range of different courses including leadership courses to up-skill employees and to deliver all of the benefits that come with that.

By using a specialist training provider, your employees can develop their leadership skills and as a result, make more effective decisions. The Lean Six Sigma courses help even the most experienced leaders to learn new techniques and improve their overall leadership capability.

If you are looking for a way to up-skill your employees, Blue Lion Academy has a range of courses that you should take a look at.