According to the World Economic Forum‘s recent future jobs report, by 2022, over half of our global workforce will require re-skilling or upskilling. With artificial intelligence and automation impacting our daily lives—at both home and work—organizations find themselves at this threshold of disruption.
Within the next ten years, 47% of our jobs will be gone, according to Deloitte. Further, according to Deloitte’s study, 67% of employees believe that they must reskill themselves to stay in their job, where 58% think that they will be in a new career within the next decade.
With disruption on our doorstep, and the future somewhat unknown, companies should emphasize employee training within their organizations, or else be left behind. Some companies have already jumped head-first into upskilling employees. For example, Amazon recently announced an “Upskilling 2025” pledge, where it will spend $700 million on re-skilling and upskilling training for its employees. Further, Google announced a $1 billion upskilling program, not just for its employees but for those at other companies as well. Grow with Google offers free training and upskilling to students, businesses, teachers, startups, and job seekers, to name a few.
Employee training and upskilling is a powerful way to adapt to the impact of automation and technological change. Since employees are our best assets, not computers or tech gadgets, let’s look at three “next big things” in employee training, to prepare you and your employees for the future.
Move your learning to a virtual platform. Although classroom training isn’t dead, it’s more cumbersome in today’s smartphone world. Virtual instructor-led training helps companies upskill or reskill their employees without the time or cost burden of the classroom.
According to Training Magazine, 86% of training participants found that virtual learning was just as or more engaging than traditional classroom training. Further, learners are just as likely to master the skills taught in the virtual setting like the classroom.
With virtual training, companies can keep learners’ attention by jumping through modalities faster than what’s offered in traditional training. Further, you can focus more on the learner experience, creating content that learners want through the technology they prefer. Through highly visible, engaging virtual learning, you can achieve the upskilling you desire through social, gamification, and communication tools, further ensuring high participation and engagement.
In 1996, Bill Gates wrote an essay declaring that content is king. Content not only helps with advertising, marketing, or Internet presence, it also is critical to employee training.
Much employee training uses curated content, meaning content that is assembled and presented as the most beneficial to your team. Often, this is “off the shelf” training and content. This type of content may work for fundamental or compliance training courses, like annual training updates on sexual harassment. However, tailoring your content specifically to your employees adds value to training on several levels.
For example, custom training content can help reinforce your brand, culture, goals, and mission. Custom training can also further engage your employees, offering them behavior-based, interactive training with their co-workers, more accurately reflecting their job. When the training is more personal, your employees will be more engaged while learning the skills needed for success within the company.
Offering engaging, virtual learning with individually crafted content puts you leaps and bounds ahead of the competition when training new employees or existing talent. However, you still need to measure the effectiveness of your training. Are your employees mastering the right skills? Do you need to adjust your training content or methods? Can you demonstrate a return on investment for your training and development?
One way to measure your training effectiveness is through the implementation of skills assessments. Through skills tests, you can identify learners’ needs and achievements. Through simulations, you can identify how employees handle specific tasks in real-life scenarios tailored to your company. You can also determine which employees might need extra training or a personalized adjustment to their practice, better helping them achieve their targets and goals.
By measuring training effectiveness, you can continually estimate the strengths of your workforce, identifying when skills gaps have been closed. With the world changing so rapidly, it’s critical to stay on top of re-skilling and upskilling in this new Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The right person in the proper role with the proper skills can make or break your company’s performance. With eSkill’s integrated approach for pre-employment assessment or skills tests, you learn how candidates will perform before you hire them, or help them succeed with training built around their skills gaps.
At eSkill, we offer the most extensive online skills tests and employment assessments catalog. We offer:
Request a demo to see how eSkill can help transform your employee training for the better.