What is reskilling? The short answer: reskilling is that the process of learning or training someone on new skills which will help them do a special job. To close the skills gap, businesses need to start thinking about how to reskill their employees for the future.
More jobs are being lost to automation per annum. According to a McKinsey study, by 2030, 73 million American jobs will become obsolete thanks to automation. This doesn’t mean all 73 million workers will become unemployed, but their jobs and skills will be got to change. If a corporation doesn’t have workers able to do the sorts of work that technological change will bring, the corporate will struggle to remain competitive.
Jobs changing as a result of technological development isn’t something new, we already see it today. The job of Database Administrator didn’t always exist – new technology has given companies access to such a lot of data that they struggle to manage all of it and obtain insights. Database Administrators are now in high demand now and the need for Database Administrators is expected to continue to grow. Ten years ago, this type of work wasn’t in demand, but it is a growing necessity today. As a particular skillset becomes more necessary, companies will either adapt and begin trying to find new workers or reskill their current workforce. Reskilling may be a proactive approach that permits a corporation to guard itself against experiencing a future talent shortage.
Reskilling employees allows companies to prepare for the challenges it will face in the long term. This process of reskilling is not something that can be done once – it’s an ongoing initiative to keep employees’ skills relevant to the work that makes the company successful.
We’ve heard time and time again — a number of us have even felt the consequences first-hand — of AI, machine learning, automation and other new technologies. Yet while many routine jobs have already been replaced by automation, new jobs are opening up to be filled by people that have the proper skills.
But here’s the dilemma we all face, especially those that are still studying or have recently graduated and are entering the work market: once we are in class and university, we begin with a curriculum that is relevant to that particular time. A couple of years down the line, who’s to say that the knowledge we’ve gained is still relevant? It may still be relevant once we first enter the work market, but the likelihood is that we’ll need to update our knowledge repeatedly to stay up with changes as our careers progress.
This is why we’d like to reskill, and why we’d like to find out constantly. Not only is reskilling necessary in our fast-changing world, but it’s also crucial to satisfy the stress of the latest jobs that we’ll need to combat that have resulted from old jobs being replaced.
Even though the consequences of technology seem so negative, we will create many opportunities from them; that’s if we keep it up learning.
In a recent Manpower Group Talent Shortage Survey of 39,195 employers in 43 countries and territories, 45 per cent of respondents said they couldn’t find the talents they have – that number climbs to 67 per cent at large organizations. In the 12 years that Manpower has conducted its annual survey, this year’s global talent shortages are at their highest levels.
Most organizations affected by the skills gap are painfully aware of their problem. “We know from our research that organizations don’t yet feel prepared to adapt to digital or AI,” says Michael Griffiths, lead for Deloitte’s Learning Consulting Practice. “The 2018 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends Report found that 72 per cent of our respondents see AI as important, but only 31 per cent feel ready to address it.”
The emergence of new technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, internet of things, mobile apps, and the pace of change in these new technologies, requires individuals in the workplace who have deep skill sets in these new technologies, and they are in short supply, notes Heide Abelli, senior vice president of content product management at Skillsoft. At the same time, workers in transportation, administrative support, sales, and logistics are finding their jobs being dramatically changed or eliminated due to automation.
In some ways, this gap is a problem of employers’ own collective making, thanks to an addictive “microwave” mentality of pushing people ashard and fast as possible. Instead of reskilling their existing workers, companies focus on recruiting new employees with the desired skills.
Only 11 per cent of C-suite and human-capital leaders said they plan to provide training or reskilling to meet changing business needs — versus 59 per cent who said they plan to hire extensively instead, one survey by Randstad Sourceright found. Rebecca Henderson, CEO of Randstad Sourceright, says this will push the skills gap even wider. “A limited number of companies are investing in on-site training programs to organize their current workforce for in-demand jobs of the longer term .”
The problem is far too vast for employers to just hire their way out of it. “No company is in a position to swap out the workforce every few years,” Abelli says. “That means companies will be required to train and retrain over and over again, as the shelf life of existing skillsets gets shorter and shorter,” she says. “Going forward, the ability to train and upskill better than the competition may end up being the one critical source of differentiation.”
