Here’s why it is necessary to upskill the next-gen workforce

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the economy and businesses, but it brought about one crucial change – it called for accelerated technological growth. The pandemic played a huge role in propelling digital transformation by a few years. And with the onset of transformation, organizations needed to ensure that their businesses ran smoothly and that employees had the necessary skills to move forward in this digital-first era.

However, some businesses had been cognisant of the various trends in the tech space even before the pandemic. It helped them not just to stay afloat but innovate their processes. Closely monitoring the trends in AI-ML deployment, the rapid digitalization of the service industry, and the slow and steady movement towards cloud solutions helped them make the shift to the work-from-home (WFH) setup much smoother.

But even for these companies, the transformation brought on by COVID meant employees had to re-learn operations — that too quickly. It was in the interest of the companies too to help in upskilling for a smooth, uninterrupted workflow.

Changing goalposts

Transforming processes meant employees had to re-learn operations and the two types of learning employees sought during the pandemic were:

• Learning in terms of solving an immediate business problem
• Skill first learning that was transformation driven

However, the focus of learning itself transitioned during the last two years. Dulles Krishnan, MD, Coursera Enterprise, India & ANZ shared that while the course on ‘mindfulness’( The Science of Well Being) on Coursera saw a spike in enrollments at the start of the pandemic, courses teaching how to be efficient at working from home have also gained popularity in these last two years.

Experiential learning

Just learning and upskilling is not enough; ensuring that these learnings find applications in the real world is of paramount importance, according to Ramkumar Narayanan, VP- Technology & MD, VMWare India. Thus, keeping abreast of upskilling the workforce through experiential learning could benefit the companies.

By providing their hires the opportunity to work on projects relating to different industries and present their transformation findings to the C-suite, the company can take note of their talent requirements. Having initiatives around innovations, capability, and engagement to be cross cutting across the organization serves as a good strategy.

What’s in it for the companies?

For any organization, upskilling trainees only makes sense if there is some return-on-investment (RoI) from it, and tracking that comes in various forms. For starters, tracking the number of training hours completed by the learners and the progress of the companies on their key goals because of these initiatives helps shed light on the efficacy of these programmes. Surveys also come in handy to see how these learnings are helping the employees achieve their career objectives, while NPS surveys to the clients accumulate information on the delivery of the project.

However, there are varying degrees of maturity that companies are at in the journey of upskilling their workforce. Tracking the number of hours of learning completed is done by companies early in their journey. But noting down the core competencies and skills required in each role and tracking it through the number of degrees and certifications completed by an employee is done by organizations more informed about the upskilling advantages.

Ultimately, companies with more skilled employees are known to have a better stock performance. Hence, it makes sense for companies to invest in the upskilling of their next-gen workforce.

Upskilling: The next big themes

For those looking to upskill, Coursera predicts that over the next few months, these skills will be hot and most sought after -- data science, AI & ML, Big Data, Digital marketing & strategy, and process automation.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post in partnership with Coursera