I know a fantastic engineer. All her managers love her, and she has references trailing behind her a mile long. However, she feels stuck, and she feels like there is nothing she can do to progress in her career.
The engineer I know is an immigrant. When she started working, she had no language skills, soft skills, and little technical experience. Most of why she is amazing sums up to the amount of experience she has working as an engineer from day to day for several decades.
At this point, she would rather retire than spend time trying to upskill or move laterally. What she needs is for her company to support her upskilling so that she is confident in advancing in her career.
Read on to find out what you can do to improve employability and to keep employees like this one happy, productive, and constantly bettering themselves.
Content Overview
Find Out What Your Competition Is Doing
Training for Motivation and Health
Find Out What Your Competition Is Doing
Do your competitors allocate $1000 per year per employee for upskilling? Can those employees spend that $1000 on whatever they want as long as it improves their skills?
How You Can Step It Up
If your employees could be replaced by software, why keep them on? It's because the human potential to learn is wonderfully expansive.
Maybe a couple of secretarial tasks can be automated. But that does not mean you should lay off your secretary; it means you should improve the employability of your workforce. Send your secretaries to grad school for business administration or something even more specialized that can't easily be automated!
You'll have an invaluable employee who will trust that their place of employment has their long-term wellbeing and career growth in mind.
Technology Is Key
One of the most valuable things to upskill is employees' technical literacy. Many older employees that are on the verge of retiring because they are frustrated with having to learn new software could benefit from upskilling.
You already have tons of employees who are already experienced with your company's particular infrastructure and culture. It would be smarter to keep them on and upskill them than to keep looking for new talent and then acclimate the new talent to your company.
Give your employees money to browse the hundreds of courses in Coursera Plus. Let them enroll in a computer science course if they're curious about programming. Either way, both of you will benefit because you will have a more skilled employee, and your employee will feel supported.
As the older workforce retires, you want to make sure you're keeping up with the competition in retaining young talent. The younger workforce is also more likely to be technologically literate, so you can help them shore up their skills in other areas, like communication, sales, or management.
Top Skills to Train
Let's be honest. People who are working don't have much time to work on professional development outside of work. Therefore, it is important that employers offer opportunities during work to train employees.
Here are some of the top skills that generate tons of value for your company:
- Leadership
- Interpersonal skills
- Analytical and critical thinking
- Writing
- Skills to specialize further
- Digital literacy
These are things that any employee of any company, of any hierarchical position, could improve on. These are things people should improve on throughout their lives, and if your company is developing employees that are solid on all these metrics, then you've got a stellar workforce, and you will attract people that want to be stellar.
Training for Motivation and Health
A happy and healthy employee is a productive one. If your business practices are terrible for your employees' mental health, then you are going to have more people taking sick leave and unmotivated workers.
One of the most important components of good mental health is satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment for people. You can easily work on this just by giving your employees a chance to learn and develop themselves.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more people are quitting their jobs than ever before. To retain your employees and practice caring employability, you need to upskill them. An upskilled worker is better able to adapt to a wide variety of challenges and will help lead by example in the workplace.
How to Upskill
Have you ever heard that the brain is a muscle? It's the science of neuroplasticity; the harder you work your brain, the harder it works for you.
One of the top desirable traits of an employee is one that is willing to continuously learn and generate value on their own. One way to foster this in employees is to create an environment where continuous learning is encouraged as the norm.
If you're constantly providing opportunities for people to learn, they will feel like they should, and can easily, take advantage of these opportunities. And the more they learn, the more confident they will be in learning more.
So, hire third-party companies to talk to your employees. Send them to leadership boot camps. Fly them out to visit conventions in their fields. Help them grow as people, and they will be healthy and happy.
