Upskilling

Upskilling: a definition

Upskilling (الارتقاء بالمهارات) is the development of an employee’s skills within their current path, so that they can perform their role at a higher level or keep pace with a change in that role, without moving into another specialism.

An employee who is upskilled stays in the same line of work. What changes is the level at which they carry out their role, or their ability to carry it out as it now has to be carried out after a change has reached it. Their specialism stays where it was, and that is the boundary the definition draws: once the development takes the employee into another specialism, it is no longer upskilling.

How upskilling differs from reskilling

Reskilling prepares an employee for a different role, at a point when their current role is shrinking or disappearing. Upskilling keeps the employee on their path and raises their level within it.

Reskilling is a change of direction, and upskilling is progress along the same line. What sets the two apart is the state of the current role. Reskilling responds to a role that is shrinking or ceasing to exist, and so it prepares the employee for somewhere else. Upskilling works on a role that the employee keeps, and so the development it brings stays within that role and the path it belongs to.

When an organisation needs upskilling

An organisation needs upskilling in situations such as these:

• A change of tool. It arises when a new system is introduced on which the employee does the same work in a different way. The work itself and what it is for stay as they were. What the employee has to acquire is the skill of carrying out that same work on the new system.
• A broadening of the role. It arises when responsibilities have been added to a role without any change to its job title. Because the title has not changed, this situation can be overlooked until its effect shows in performance. By that point the employee has been carrying the added responsibilities without the development that would have prepared them for those responsibilities.
• Preparation for the next level. It develops the employee within their current path towards the level above the one they hold, and this is where upskilling connects with succession planning.
• A measured gap. It is a gap that has surfaced in a training needs analysis. In this situation the need for upskilling is not assumed in advance: the analysis has measured the gap, and the measurement is what shows that the need exists.

Where upskilling stumbles in practice

There are three procedural reasons for which upskilling can stumble in practice, and none of them concerns the quality of the training content. The content can therefore be sound and the upskilling still fail, because each of the three reasons lies in the conditions the organisation sets around the training rather than in what the training teaches.

1. No opportunity to apply the skill. A skill that is learnt and not used within weeks fades. The training then becomes a cost with no effect: the organisation has paid for it, and once the skill has faded, nothing of what was paid for remains in the employee’s work.
2. No time set aside for the training. Training that the employee is asked to complete on top of a full workload is put off, and is then completed as a formality. Because no part of the employee’s time has been allocated to it, the training waits behind the work that already fills that time, and when it is finally done, it is done in form rather than in substance.
3. No link to a decision. If nothing changes after the employee has acquired the skill, with no new task, no new responsibility and no weight given to it in their career path, then the message the employee receives is that training is a procedure, not an investment. A procedure is something to be completed and recorded. An investment is expected to return something, and in that case nothing that follows the training shows that a return was expected.

What makes upskilling work

The order of steps that changes the outcome of upskilling is a simple one:

1. Identifying the gap. It comes first: the distance between what the role requires and what the employee currently does is established.
2. Choosing the method. The way of addressing that distance is selected according to it, not according to whatever happens to be available.
3. Assigning a real task. The employee is given actual work in which the skill is put to use within a short period.
4. Measuring the effect. What the skill has changed is measured against an indicator that was out of line before the upskilling.

Without the third step, the training remains knowledge that the employee holds and has had no occasion to use in their work.

The second step depends on the first, because the method is chosen according to the gap that the first step identified. Choosing the method according to whatever happens to be available puts what is on hand ahead of the gap that the method is meant to address. The third step gives the skill a use within a short period, which is the opportunity to apply that is missing under the first of the three procedural reasons above, where a skill that is not used within weeks fades. The fourth step needs an indicator that was already out of line before the upskilling began, because the effect being measured is the change in that indicator once the skill is in use.

What upskilling means for the employee

Upskilling is one of the things that make staying a reasonable choice for an employee. Someone who sees their capabilities grow where they already are has no need to leave the organisation in order to progress.

For that reason upskilling is directly connected with an organisation’s retention strategy. It is connected not as an additional benefit placed alongside the work, but as a part of the employee value proposition itself, the offer the organisation makes to the people who work for it.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.