The current job market is as tough as any has been in recent memory for employers. Older workers are retiring in droves and contributing to resignations and a dearth of quality applicants across all industries as workers leave to find better pay and more favorable jobs.
Consider some statistics reported by Jason Wise in an article for Earthweb:
- 94% of American retailers are experiencing issues with managing job vacancies.
- 55% of workers in America are planning on looking for new jobs.
- 41% of the global workforce is considering quitting their jobs.
When the labor market is tight, employers have a handful of options available to them:
- They can raise wages to attract more and better applicants through financial brute force.
- They can allow positions to go unfilled and try to do more with less.
- They can use automation and robotics.
- They can look to outsource some functions to outside companies or contractors—although this can be expensive and is subject to the same labor market constraints as hiring directly.
Or, they can try to upskill their existing labor force to take on more responsibilities.
Training Signals a Commitment to Employees
Upskilling certainly provides benefits to organizations trying to tackle a skills shortage amid what has been called the “Great Resignation.” But there are other benefits, as well.
Another less obvious benefit of investing in upskilling existing employees is that it signals the company is committed to them long term. Why spend time, money, and effort training someone the company doesn’t plan to keep around much longer? Employees who are given further training feel appreciated and valued, and this has an immeasurable positive impact on morale, productivity, and retention.
Where Are Employers Focusing?
With a general shortage of labor, the staff employers do have on hand often need to take on a greater range of responsibilities, as well as more substantive responsibilities. Even entry-level employees need to have better time management, organizational, and decision-making skills. Therefore, it’s not surprising that these are the types of skills many employers are prioritizing when it comes to upskilling.
Here’s how some companies are approaching this need and opportunity:
- “To support growth, organizations need to focus on training future and new leaders to ensure continuous development while delivering on promises made to clients, members, and employees,” says Elizabeth Reimer, CHRO at Premise Health. “Like many, our greatest training need today is delivering a leadership development program to drive changes in behavior.”
- “One area that we’re trying to address with training is a greater need for project management skills,” says Nelson Sherwin, manager of PEO Companies. “Having skills such as logistics will be increasingly valuable as we ask our people to do more with less.”
- “Due to current conditions, we’ve started to become more reliant on our existing workers and training them to be more effective,” says Todd Ramblin, manager at Cable Compare. “We feel that everyone in our organization is going to be called on to make more critical decisions, so this is one of our greatest training needs.”
It’s also important to consider how training will be delivered, especially in an increasingly remote or hybrid working environment.
Training in a Virtual Environment
Once employers decide they do want to further train their staff and determine what content is most essential, they need to determine how to deliver that content most efficiently and effectively.
Because the pandemic has disrupted where—and when—many employees work, an entirely in-person training approach is not likely to work for most companies. Instead, virtual training has become an attractive option because of its flexibility and scalability.
Many companies are still operating largely remotely, making in-person training particularly difficult. Moreover, virtual training lends itself to further capabilities, such as on-demand training that can be watched by any number of staff at their convenience.
“With most of our people still working remotely, we’ve been using online training to meet our needs,” says Ramblin. “We’ve found success using online courses from e-learning platforms. The biggest challenge we’ve faced is getting high-quality online courses to the people who need them while staying within our L&D budget.”
In-Person Training Remains a Viable Option
At the same time that many employers are increasingly relying on remote training, there are also obvious benefits to in-person, hands-on training. It’s often easier to create and maintain engagement with in-person trainees, and real-time instruction allows for more interaction between trainer and trainee.
“It has been somewhat of a struggle, but we have found some success with in-house training and finding a local college to help with building a proper course for both new and more experienced workers,” says Laura Fuentes, operator of Infinity Dish Email. Infinity, says Fuentes holds in-house training sessions that are delivered very much like traditional classroom education.
“Hands-on teaching is something our people felt much more comfortable with than with a simple webinar or online instructional course,” Fuentes says. “This way there’s more feedback about what is working or what might be hindering the learning process.”
Infinity has augmented traditional, in-person training delivery with supplemental digital learning material. This allows employees flexibility and ensures access to information on-site and at home.
“Before we brought on a local professor to help us design our instructional course, we mostly relied on a simple e-learning template,” Fuentes adds. “There is a large difference between being able to relay information and building a curriculum which actually benefits the learning party. We saw a lot of disengagement with our courses and decided we needed help building a solid course our team will benefit from.”
The Great Resignation has created tremendous disruption in corporate America and, indeed, around the world. Employers, even those with the will and the means to hire more staff, are often forced to rely on relatively small teams to keep their basic operations going, let alone to plan and execute opportunities for growth and expansion.
Upskilling existing staff can be a great strategy to help do more with less. Upskilling not only helps solve some current staffing challenges; it also signals a commitment to current staff, helping to reduce turnover and avoid greater staffing challenges down the road.
Lin Grensing-Pophal is a Contributing Editor at HR Daily Advisor.