Why Reskilling Fails

In the last post on reskilling, we discussed why upskilling and reskilling are becoming key to company’s sustainable growth. In this post, we will discuss some of the reasons why both workers and companies (trying to reskill their workforce) are not able to achieve the desired objectives.

When we talk about workers, who need to upskill and reskill themselves, these include workers with moderate skill level with lower than median salaries. From job family perspective, these mainly include manufacturing, construction and retail workers. Now, there are multiple reasons why these workers are not able to reskill themselves. The first and foremost being the lack of awareness about what skill sets they can gain to move into new jobs. In addition to this, they also lack any knowledge, whatsoever, of the career trajectory that they can have by learning new skill sets.

Coming to the workers who are aware of the skill set requirements and are willing to put effort to learn the same, the current dysfunctional education system and their financial condition makes it impossible for them to pursue the requisite course for skill enhancement.

On the enterprise side, the issue starts with integrity of the candidate and the amount of trust between the employer and the employee. Enterprises are afraid to commit financial resources on employees, who they feel can leave them after skill enhancement. So, the first issue to resolve is the trust deficit.

When enterprises plan for reskilling and try to engage employees in reskilling and upskilling programs, they are often hit with the hard reality that they don’t have requisite internal capabilities to train their workforce. In these cases, enterprises look to third-party firms to train their workforce. However, here another concern arises around the lack of outcome-oriented training courses in the market. So, while reskilling promises the moon (business sustainability), it is really difficult to build the spaceship (capabilities) to reach there.