HRD Collective Recap: Insights from Myskillcamp Workshop

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24th February 2022, HRD Collective invited myskillcamp to participate in their event. Our CEO and Co-Founder, Kevin Tillier ran a workshop called: Upskilling & reskilling; Which skills are in demand, who needs them, and how to make people engage.

If you want to see the video rather than read the recap, you can watch here.

Alternatively, if you want to see what else myskillcamp can do for you, find out here.

Kevin starts by showing who exactly cares about upskilling/reskilling from a company perspective. These can be split into three main groups:

• Companies that want to remain competitive

One example given, is that AT&T retrained nearly half its workforce after discovering they lacked the skills needed to keep the company competitive.

• Companies that want to retain their employees

First West Credit Union found that upskilling their employees led to increased revenue– $200,000 per retained employee and a total return of $2.5 million.

• Companies that want to close skills gaps

According to a Mckinsey report, 44 percent of respondents say their company will face skill gaps within the next five years.

Kevin explains, "If you want to remain competitive, keep on developing new and exciting products, you need to upskill your workforce, they're the ones building the products and taking care of your customers".

The presentation then covers why you should care about upskilling and reskilling, covering reasons you probably haven't considered...

• The 'best-before date' on skills

Companies are fighting to stay ahead of the curve, trying to hold onto their best talent and struggling to fill key positions.

And individuals are conscious of staying relevant in the age of automation.

• Boost workplace performance

"If you want a company to boost performance you need to develop those capabilities that your learners have to ensure you remain competitive and they can help you contribute to the company's growth". Kevin explains.

• Software-led training increasing in popularity

A recent survey by Prudential included in the presentation, shows the willingness of people to learn tech-based skills.

• Stopping 'the Great Resignation'

With Kevin mentioning that he himself is part of the 'resigning generation', he suggests that Millennials don't like to stand still. They need recognition, a good workplace culture and motivation - all of which can be provided by companies that offer training to their workforce. More information on stopping the great resignation was given in the presentation.

The workshop then moved onto the 3 steps to facilitate upskilling and reskilling.

• Identifying skills

"The upskilling and reskilling journey actually starts when you identify skills from your workforce, and the time to do that is during the onboarding process..."

states Kevin, "...because once you do that, it will help the manager know the employee and know how to guide them towards various courses, learning journeys, learning paths and so on".

• Retaining current employees

The workshop shows how to retain a workforce by continuing to take an interest in employee careers and what they can learn to achieve the next level. It's also explained that companies should consider reonboarding if they go through company shifts, culture changes or high-levels of recruitment. "It's really key for you to reonboard your existing employees once in a while when you feel like you need to realign everyone" says Kevin, who also shared more information on how to reonboard existing employees.

• Developing and deploying training

"And then you need to develop and deploy exciting training. training that actually matters to your workforce, and not just going with a catalogue approach". Kevin explains to the attendees that solely relying on a catalogue approach can easily overwhelm learners with the sheer amount of courses available.

"So collect the data, see which skills are most needed within the team, invest their time on courses or learning journeys that really matter, not just for them, but for your organisation".

The workshop then shifts into looking at which skills are in demand for upskilling and reskilling, and why.

Firstly, skills that will help close the skills gap felt by companies, worldwide.

Kevin shows that tech-based skills are growing in need, but reflects; "whenever I meet a company, they have more soft skills than tech-driven skills in their learning catalogue" showing that it's easy for a company's skills gaps to go unnoticed without proper assessments.

The workshop also looked at which skills are increasing in popularity via LinkedIn job search results, as well as the previous job roles of those who were hired.

It's interesting to see the clear link between the jobs that are in demand. Again, tech-based jobs and roles that have always needed to stay up to date with technology.

The final part of the workshop focused on how to promote learning within a workforce. Kevin listed six methods to do so.

• Gamifying learning

It was shown in the workshop that gamification is a way of hacking the human psyche that makes learners want to return to the course. Kevin noted that you need to "take into consideration that whatever the gamification mechanism that you put in place, there are four different types of players in the workforce". You can discover what they are here.

• Engaging ambition, motivation and opportunity

All three of these (in part) can be reached by focusing on training, and once done so, job satisfaction will increase.

• Fostering a learning mindset

Kevin explains, "We're all learners, yet we don't all have learning mindsets. It's something you can promote within your organisation, and you can promote it within 3 different actions that happen within a career. Succession planning, talent review and during a career pathing".

• Personalisation

It was noted in the workshop that 74% Of consumers get frustrated when they receive content that isn't personalised. This directly translates to the need for personalised training courses for learners. Luckily, Kevin mentions the helping hand to personalisation...

"Today's technology enables you to bring more personalisation within your learning journey".

• Making time to learn

The #1 reason employees feel held back from learning is because they don't have the time. So make time for them to learn. "You need to find a strategy to make sure your workforce can learn whenever they want, on the job if needed and whenever they decide to take the learning action, they can actually do it"!

Kevin continues, "So moving through microlearning courses instead of 16 hour courses is an idea, and schedule courses by putting them in their agenda is also great to do moving forward".

• Using eLearning

Included in the workshop is the statistic; According to LinkedIn job searches, 84% of searches are for remote jobs. And on average, those remote jobs receive 4x the applications that onsite jobs do.

But for those who are anxious about using elearning, Kevin has some advice: "eLearning doesn't mean you're learning alone, all by yourself, without any personalisation. It can be social, collaborative, personalised, so I really invite you to really apply eLearning whenever possible".

The final part of the workshop explained the myskillcamp platform and how it can help those wanting to upskill or reskill themselves or their workforce.

According to Kevin, "We bring a new methodology in our learning platform where we start by assessing the learner, assessing the workforce and recommend the journey".

Kevin continues, "We have plugins where you can actually bring adaptive learning experiences, personalisation, assessments and recommendations into one place, along with your own content." Not to mention the 300,000 courses available on the platform already.

From being at the workshop you were able to get a full grasp of all the points and the accompanying links to studies and research. So if you didn't get a chance to attend the workshop at HRD Collective, or you'd like a copy of the presentation for yourself, then download it here to learn more.

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