The BTN recently partnered with Eightfold for an exclusive roundtable event. The open and interactive session around “Redundancy Vs. Reskilling & Reassigning” was hosted by Nick Timpson (Strategic Account Director at Eightfold) and James Ballard (Founding Partner and Executive Search Lead at Annapurna Recruitment) which brought about the following takeaways:
It’s cheaper to develop your own people
Workplaces worldwide are currently going through an upskilling and reskilling revolution driven by digitalisation. HR professionals’ priorities are now starting to become more focused on developing their employees and spending time upskilling as businesses seek to address the continuing lack of talent in the labour market. Demand for new capabilities gathers pace, with reskilling and upskilling enabling your organisation to develop the skills needed to remain competitive. These skills challenges have elevated strategic workforce planning as a lever for HR success. Alongside changes in the way we work, advances in technology and innovation have caused many companies to reassess the skills they need to thrive in the workplace. The enhanced emphasis on skills development must be prioritised to enable organisations to stay in touch with the competition.
Advancements in technology are paving the way to increase efficiency across the business but can have detrimental impacts on making employees feel obsolete if this isn’t managed in the best way. Upskilling and reskilling workers can be the solution to helping employees to feel empowered. If a company’s talent is not developed correctly, the outcomes can be extremely expensive when it comes to employee dissatisfaction and disengagement. Investing and developing your own employees is essential to achieve much higher engagement. Therefore, when it comes to Upskilling and reassigning, investing in your own people is essential and an effective way to ensure business growth.
Upskilling allows people to progress
Upskilling has become a workplace trend that facilitates continuous learning by providing development opportunities and training programmes that are able to expand employees’ abilities and minimise skill gaps. The World Economic Forum predicts that over half of all global employees will need to upskill or reskill by 2025 to keep up with the evolution of jobs. Upskilling can be used in multiple ways to enable employees to advance even further in their jobs and find different roles/opportunities within the company. If technology can be the facilitation that creates new opportunities and job positions within the workplace, it is important for companies to complement the technology with people decisions which fill these new roles with candidates who possess the relevant, specialised skill sets.
Upskilling allows organisations to close the expanding digital talent gap and fill open positions, whilst maintaining their current workforce, creating employee strengthening and learning opportunities. Businesses that offer upskilling opportunities are more likely to attract new talent than organisations that don’t, as it demonstrates a commitment to employees’ professional development and career progression. It also helps attract ambitious and driven employees who aim to commit to a company long-term. If firms are able to show that they can invest in their people, this will have positive impacts on the wider employer brand also.
Talent is more effective when diverse
A diverse workforce is vital within all organisations for plenty of reasons that are tangible and many more reasons that shouldn’t need to be justified. Inclusive teams embed different perspectives that can lead to greater collaboration and creative thinking. Developing inclusive upskilling opportunities can aid business leaders in truly building a culture of belonging, and drive development and career progressions—all whilst simultaneously closing their skill gaps. Working directly to promote incoming early talent means that organisations are able to bring in a fresh perspective, increase the organisation’s personal power, foster organisational growth and facilitate the potential to take over leadership roles when senior employees leave.
Despite this, bringing in new talent directly from education can be a challenge for many firms, due to the time and effort that is required when it comes to learning and development. There are, however, different ways that organisations can ensure they are providing the time for people to learn. Eightfold, in particular, is the industry’s first Talent Intelligence Platform that transforms how you hire, retain, and grow a diverse workforce. They believe that people are every enterprise’s greatest asset, and want to put them at the centre.
Therefore, in order to retain top talent and obtain positive business outcomes, firms need to be investing in their people and ensure that a clear vision is shown for progression.
About Eightfold
Eightfold’s deep-learning talent intelligence platform is powered by the largest global talent data set to unleash the full potential of the total workforce – employees, candidates, contractors, and citizens. Grounded in Equal Opportunity Algorithms, the Eightfold® Talent Intelligence Platform uses deep-learning AI to help: attract the best talent for the job, understand how your workforce stacks up against the competition, identify and develop skills to unlock workforce potential, deliver bias-free talent recruitment, and much more.
