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7 Ways to Reskill and Upskill Your Employees

Edited by Indeed Employer Content Team

Upskilling and reskilling employees is smart business. If you can retain a current employee with up-to-date skills, your company can save the money it would have spent on recruiting replacements. Upskilling is the act of improving an employee’s job skills to take on more responsibility, say after a promotion, or to expand their existing capabilities. Reskilling is a cost-saving way to switch employees over to new roles, sometimes very different jobs within your company, with the training they need to thrive.

Investing in your employees’ training has several benefits. When you build a solid upskilling program, not only do you save on the cost of replacing employees with outmoded job skills, but you also create a conveyor belt of talent from the entry-level position into your company’s management. Reskilling on a big scale encourages employees to share ideas and work across boundaries to accomplish goals. Finally, there’s no substitute for the effects this kind of investment can have on workplace morale and for how it helps retention and performance overall.

There are a lot of ways to approach both upskilling and reskilling your workforce. Ideally, the programs you set up will be easy to implement, have a positive success rate and remain cost-effective at the scale you need to implement them. Fortunately, there are a lot of resources available at low or no cost that can help you set up the skills advancement program your company needs.

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1. Access affordable online platforms

The age of the internet offers free and reduced-cost learning. There are plenty of free and low-cost online resources you can use for formal workplace training, and many of them are specifically designed for upskilling and reskilling workers at a reasonable cost. Here are a few of the more popular and cost-effective platforms you can sign up for:

General Assembly

General Assembly teaches digital marketing, data science tools and product management. It also has training modules for evaluating and reporting on user experience (UX). Major employers such as Conde Nast, Loreal and Visa use General Assembly to upskill or reskill their workers. Consider this platform if you need to build out your marketing or customer service teams, or if you’re switching away from traditional call centers and into a more cost-effective online help system.

Coding Dojo

Coding Dojo goes heavy on tech skills. Major tech giants use the platform to teach very specific coding and IT skills to their employees. Coding Dojo clients include HP, eBay, Cisco, Microsoft, Apple, IBM and Uber. This is an almost ideal choice for teaching your software engineers new languages, such as Java, Python, Mean and Ruby.

Dale Carnegie

Dale Carnegie was a 20th-century leader in sales and marketing, with a strong emphasis on soft skills such as persuasion and consensus building. The institute that bears his name teaches these skills for employees of companies like John Deere, Delta Dental, Cargill and Green Mountain Coffee. Look into this program for your sales and customer service teams, mainly for upskilling workers to be more productive and potentially as part of your manager training.

Udemy Business

Udemy Business teaches a range of topics that are highly relevant to modern companies. Courses include IT, management theory, marketing, operations training and project management skills. Udemy Business is used by Kaiser Permanente, Adidas, General Mills and Volkswagen for upskilling and reskilling their workforces. This is a good general-purpose resource for employees in any division of your company.

2. Curate an open list of free resources for workers to check out

In addition to the formal workplace training you can get from online academies, it never hurts to encourage workers to look into resources on their own time. Because this is largely something they do outside of work, all of the resources you recommend should be widely available online and free to use.

Because many of these platforms are large and have diverse offerings, your approved list should get really specific about videos to watch or articles to read. You can even create training course playlists or recommended reading lists on the company’s website and directly link to the materials to make it easy to follow. Great free resources for learning specific skills include:

  • Khan Academy
  • edX
  • Coursera
  • FutureLearn

3. Develop relationships with training partners

Every successful company has some unique skills in-house, and there are ways to benefit from others’ investments in upskilling and reskilling their own workforces. Approach other employers about sharing skills with each others’ employees. Partnerships like this can be extremely productive, and you aren’t limited to potential competitors inside your own industry. If your company has a large and tech-savvy IT team but few or no marketing resources, for example, an employer in a different market may be willing to partner with you to temporarily place some of your employees on their marketing teams while your IT team trains their employees in technology.

4. Turn managers into coaches

It’s a good idea to establish a central point for cross-training employees who have varying levels of expertise within a company. Highlight the role a frontline supervisor has in training and development. First-level supervision should include weekly or monthly training assessments and individualized training plans. The personal relationships that exist on this level allow each team leader to pair employees who have specific skills to teach.

5. Create working/study groups

You can expand the principle of team development by creating formal structures for upskilling and reskilling your workforce. Consider setting up business resource groups where employees can meet and cross train, following a curriculum set by the company. Under this arrangement, a team of a dozen workers can gradually share their unique skills until everyone has at least a familiarity with every skill relevant to their job. IT professionals can share their knowledge with customer service representatives, who can then share customer insights with engineers and so on.

6. Bring in outside trainers

The world of corporate trainers is big and growing, and there’s probably a teacher available for any subject your employees need to learn. Browse around for trainers who can travel to your office or who are available remotely, and who have experience teaching the skills you want your employees to learn. This can be costly, but the additional skills your employees acquire more than offset the initial expense.

7. Create projects for upskilling and reskilling employees

Finally, remember that upskilling and reskilling is an ongoing process. From time to time, invest in refresher training to keep perishable skills sharp. You could also take a goal-oriented approach to training by establishing projects for your teams to complete. For example, you can assign customer service reps the job of developing a new order interface. This encourages employees to broaden their skill sets and, in the process, helps to upskill and reskill employees across the board.

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