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Reskilling employees: One employee at a time


The current transformation in the way we work leading to requirement of new skill sets can be compared to the skill set change required from manufacturing to services economy. While that change occurred over decades, the current one is playing out in years, if not months. Many organizations are undertaking reskilling programs to update the skill set of their incumbent workers. However, most of them are failing to achieve positive outcomes. This means all the dollars being spent on reskilling going to waste along with loss of productivity and increasing spend on hiring external workers.

The biggest problem with these failed efforts is the big bang nature of these undertakings. Instead of taking a focused employee specific approach to reskilling, enterprises are trying to force same set of training to each employee. This approach is bound to fail as different employees have different needs and can excel in different ways
Organizations need to understand that they need to customize their reskilling and training efforts to suit to employee needs. The training programs need to be customized for different geographies, distinct business units, etc. There is no need to change the entire skill set of every employee. Reimagination of employee’s work process need to be considered and a trajectory needs to be decided to provide the employee the skill set he/she needs to excel in the organization. This will not help the company in terms of future sustainability, it will also provide them loyal and productive employees.

Government support is also needed as organizations alone cannot bear the burden of retraining their employees. The effort and the monetary requirement are huge. A good example of government level support can be seen in UK. The UK government introduced a skill tax few years back where the organizations can either pay a percentage tax to government which it will use for reskilling workers or it can get it back from government if it promises to spend the same on reskilling of workers.

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