The Secret to Successful Upskilling: Start Small

Ever since COVID-19 accelerated the digital transformation, companies have been racing to find the skills they need to compete. Some have hired from the outside. Others have generated large learning libraries. And others have undertaken large-scale initiatives to teach workers, say, the five skills they need most. 

If there’s one common thread to these efforts, it’s that it has been exhausting trying to figure this out.   

But Lori Niles-Hofmann, a Toronto-based learning strategist and cofounder of the NilesNolen consultancy, thinks tackling it all at once is the wrong approach. Instead, she advises: Start small. 

“When I say, ‘Start small,’” Lori explains, “I mean you need to target skills that are in demand by your organization and are difficult to find externally, and you need to know exactly how many people you’re going to target. You need to be very deliberate in your upskilling.” 

We recently spoke with Lori — whose LinkedIn Learning course Upskilling and Reskilling Your Workforce was just released — about exactly how to do this. 

1. Pick one area — and one or two skills — to focus on 

The World Economic Forum estimates that more than half of all employees around the world need to upskill or reskill by 2025 to keep up with the changes in the workplace. 

While this may feel daunting and even overwhelming, Lori suggests that companies start by focusing on one area that needs transformation the most. Then they should figure out which employees will be most affected by the skills gap as a result of the coming change. 

To illustrate what this looks like, Lori points to one of her clients, a large, traditional European bank. The bank started a seven-year digital transformation in 2018 and quickly realized that the transition would have the greatest impact on its employees who work with customers in brick-and-mortar branches. 

So, this is where they started their upskilling. They built capabilities academies and taught frontline employees how to use new software, hold different conversations with customers, and be vigilant about fraud. 

If you’re not sure which area or skills to focus on first, Lori suggests asking, “How will filling this gap help us make money, save money, or mitigate risk?” You may want to start with a pain point for the organization and something that is tangible or measurable. For many companies, she says, the most-needed skills right now are related to cybersecurity and “anything to do with automation.” 

2. Use your initial experimentation to develop a prototype

After you’ve chosen a specific area and skills, use your first initiative to develop a prototype that can be used for larger upskilling projects later. You’re trying to create a model, Lori explains, that shows, “How do we take employees from zero to effective?” 

The process Lori outlines has three steps. First, give employees an opportunity to learn the skill through online or in-person training. Then provide feedback from a manager, coach, or mentor. Finally, provide an opportunity for employees to reinforce their new skill through practical experience such as a stretch project.  

After creating this initial learning system, Lori suggests performing an “autopsy” on it to look at how effectively people mastered the new skill, how long it took, and how much it cost. From there, you can develop a prototype that includes a timeline of when an employee learns a skill, when feedback is given and in what form, and how to create opportunities for reinforcement. She emphasizes that you’re not building a learning path based on, say, three or four course libraries. You’re building a framework for teaching a new skill. 

3. Be clear on roles and responsibilities to avoid duplication

Lori dreams of a day when all companies have a chief skills officer to oversee this strategy. At the moment, only a handful of organizations across the globe seem to have such a role. 

Because there’s rarely one person overseeing all upskilling initiatives, Lori cautions that companies need to be clear on roles and responsibilities when developing a prototype and launching an upskilling initiative. Even though there’s a big movement for L&D and other parts of HR to share overlapping responsibilities, she urges everyone to “stay in your own lane.” 

Why? Because she’s seen cases where L&D has been working on a skills taxonomy without realizing that HR is doing one of its own and that each is approaching it in a different way. And while she loves collaboration, she says, “I don’t think it’s the job of L&D to own all of the skills and decide what skills to invest in.” Instead, she urges learning professionals to tap into the people who have that knowledge, including the talent and business teams — and then let L&D do what it does best, which is help employees learn and grow in their careers. 

4. Use your prototype for large-scale upskilling initiatives

After you’ve focused on one area, developed a prototype, and delineated responsibilities, what’s next? Upskilling on a larger scale. 

The European bank, for example, next applied its prototype to the organization’s engineering staff, which was at risk of 30% of its skills becoming obsolete. In particular, they needed to polish up on their cybersecurity and cloud computing skills. So the bank leveraged external content libraries and simulators, enlisted internal experts to act as coaches and mentors, and used the prototype as the framework to bring their engineers up to speed. 

Like the European bank, you can decide where to apply your prototype next. And don’t freak out if various functions put their own spin on it, especially in large, global organizations.  

“In the real world,” Lori says, “not the ideal one, you’re probably going to say, ‘Here’s our prototype; this is how we’ve been working on it for your region; and here’s how we’d like you to use it,’ but you probably won’t have that control.” 

When you roll out an initiative that focuses on one or two skills company-wide, however, you’ll go a long way toward preventing duplication and ensuring that employees learn skills the company actually needs. 

Final thoughts: Approach upskilling like an ER approaches triage

Because skills are constantly emerging and developing, L&D needs to stay flexible. Lori suggests approaching upskilling in the same way that emergency rooms approach triage. As new patients arise, healthcare providers assess which cases are most urgent and which can wait. In business, you can do the same thing by measuring new skills against how they’ll help your company’s key performance indicators. 

“Ask yourself, ‘How does this skill contribute to our KPIs?’” Lori suggests. “If it’s 10%, that’s like having the sniffles, and it’s going to be lower in the queue. But if it’s directly going to contribute to product development or innovation to stay competitive, move it to the top of the line.”