Upskilling prepares you for future disruption: Lessons learned from the pandemic
The pandemic has demonstrated that upskilling can help your workforce prepare for future disruption.
With virtual meetings and collaboration tools now in the spotlight, employees have had to build new skills to get their work done. Company executives quickly realized, however, that more important skills were needed to maintain business continuity across a remote workforce.
With economies and industries worldwide showing signs of recovery, people are ready, not just to get back to normal, but to try new ways of working. Now’s the time to build a corporate culture around upskilling and innovation. By providing a safe place for employees to create and test their own digital tools, you can help boost confidence and build a stronger problem-solving mindset across all departments and groups within the enterprise.
Upskilling can help you prepare for the next disruption. To start the journey, it’s critical to understand:
Why upskilling is critical to navigating constant change
How to get your team on board with a continuous learning model
How end-to-end platforms can take the guesswork out of upskilling
Boosting digital skills during disruption
A strong workforce should expand beyond its current skill sets to help meet market needs. You need a workforce that can adapt to market changes and a learning culture ready to take on new tech challenges. Equipping your company to meet the demands of worker attrition—or the need for reskilling—can position you to excel in a post-disruption economy.
Transforming workplaces through technology, and moving to a distributed workforce model, takes effort. As the shift to remote work continues, major upskilling or reskilling may be necessary to pull off a big transition.
According to a recent study, 40% of workers focused on upskilling during the pandemic. They improved their digital skills in fields like data analytics and automation, and 76% of CEOs believe the shift to embrace automation initiatives will endure for some time––making upskilling more of an imperative than it’s ever been before.
Getting the team on board with upskilling
A skills gap analysis can determine your team’s baseline and identify upskilling priorities that align with corporate goals and engage your workforce. The insights generated can help build personalized learning pathways that better fit your company’s roles and job functions, which, in turn, can motivate individuals by showing them a definitive way forward in their upskilling journey.
Once you have an idea of where your people are in their upskilling journey, it's time to look at big picture initiatives, like championing a culture of learning within the organization.
Companies with upskilling programs and platforms have an edge
No one can predict what the next major disruption will be. The time for upskilling or newskilling or rightskilling (however you may describe it) is now. Talent acquisition is expensive and difficult, so upskilling programs and platforms can help enhance the skills of your existing talent base.
Upskilling solutions like PwC's ProEdge can help close your organization’s skills gaps. It’s an end-to-end platform that identifies the skills you have and the skills you need. It also customizes and deploys function-specific learning pathways. ProEdge even provides opportunities for employees to practice and apply newly acquired skills to maximize upskilling benefits and add value to the business quickly.
In the post-pandemic world, helping your workers overcome upskilling challenges can only benefit your company's success. Upskilling and reskilling a workforce that's entering a new economic boom could have a transformative payoff.
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Invest in tomorrow
Stay ahead of the curve with PwC ProEdge, the revolutionary way to upskill your people and prepare your organization for tomorrow. This unique platform allows you to pinpoint critical skill gaps and effectively help close them with automatically generated personalized learning pathways. Leading curated content, coursework and hands-on learning empower your workforce to make an immediate impact at scale. ProEdge enables your people to perform at their highest level—giving them the power to help transform your entire organization.