Reskilling an upskilling are always being discussed in companies, especially recently, but what could this look like in practice? We’ve seen the tech landscape go through a lot of ups, high growth and expansions but also downs with layoffs and redundancies. They key to getting through this is adaptability; resilience can come down to how companies approach skills within their organization.
The macro picture
Talent professionals have to be versatile, in many ways we’re the Swiss Army knives of a company, often doing People and HR-related work alongside hiring, managing the hiring journey like a sales process, creating an EVP to attract talent, and working across multiple disciplines to find the best people. Essentially, in hiring you often do Sales, Marketing, Operations and have to think about your hiring process like a product in itself.
Having been part of this wider tech landscape over the course of the last 6 years, something I have learned is that in order to be as impactful to a business as possible, reskilling myself has become key and upskilling outside the usual business as usual of hiring is critical. One thing I have seen time and time again in the space is people talking about the need for companies to reskill and redeploy their hiring teams to new departments, and it makes sense.
So why not make use of these skills in other areas?
According to Gartner, organizations are facing a ‘transformation deficit’ with the rate of change increasing by 5x since 2016, but the willingness of employees to change has slumped from 74% to 43%. With increasing change, it's essential that employees are willing, and able, to support that change internally.
We believe that accessibility to reskilling and upskilling tools plays a huge part in this, as without the right platform or tools in place, adding or learning new skills can come across as a complicated and laborious task.
In my opinion, companies can also be afraid of doing work around upskilling and reskilling. Why? On the surface it can be daunting (if you look at job title alone), re-training, ramping up and then not being guaranteed results or ROI in the same way you would get from a more experienced professional in that area.
However, if you look at the skills of a talent professional (for example), it is often not all that different from your other departments and with the right tools in place and coaching, it is not that difficult to transition and upskill. That’s what we decided at Learn Amp and what we are putting into practice.
Check out what we've written about employee learning, development, progression, and performance!
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The Power of Progression: Linking Employee Development to Performance Excellence Creating a virtuous circle between employee Learning, Development, Progression and Performance Improvement.
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How we did it
Having had a career so far of both agency and in-house talent acquisition and more recently in the People space and with our company in a business as usual in talent needs, I wanted to take the opportunity to expand my impact in the business; taking what I have learned from a career in Talent into the Sales team.
This was made easier with the tools we had in place. I've been able to use Learn Amp not just as a user and stakeholder but also as someone who has now used our industry-leading People Development Hub in order to upskill myself into the Sales Team at Learn Amp whilst we focus on our ambitious growth targets.
Having access to a knowledge base and content library like we do in Learn Amp and being able to seamlessly follow our sales training and enablement content all in one place has meant what once would seem daunting has been a genuinely exciting and interesting experience.
Now that I am ramped up and am starting to conduct discovery calls, not only do I feel confident in my alignment with the business, but also confident that anything I want to know, I can find in one simple-to-use platform. It also made me think there are so many other people like me who could not just transition but thrive in a new environment if given the right support, training, and tools.
What's next
So I’ve successfully transitioned my impact into a new area of the business. and if you’re reading this and thinking “I can do that” then I’d love to talk about our approach and also what more you can do with our platform (it is the best in the industry after all).
