6 estrategias para mejorar las habilidades de su fuerza laboral

El Foro Económico Mundial estima que más de la mitad de todos los empleados a nivel mundial deberán mejorar o volver a capacitarse para el 2025, de forma que puedan adaptarse a la naturaleza cambiante de los trabajos.

Muchas organizaciones están recurriendo a la recapacitación para desarrollar el talento que no pueden adquirir o implementar productivamente.

Al reimaginar los enfoques tradicionales de capacitación, los líderes empresariales y de recursos humanos pueden tomar medidas oportunas para preparar a su fuerza laboral para el futuro.

6 Strategies to Upskill Your Workforce
Sagar Goel, J. Puckett, Pablo Claver and Orsolya Kovacs-Ondrejkovic
c. 2022 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp.
Sagar Goel is a partner and associate director in Boston Consulting Group’s Singapore office. J. Puckett is a managing director and senior partner in Boston Consulting Group’s Dallas office. Pablo Claver is a managing director and partner in Boston Consulting Group’s Madrid office. Orsolya Kovacs-Ondrejkovic is an associate director in Boston Consulting Group’s Zurich office.
From HBR.org

Imagine this scenario: You are behind your competitors in digital transformation and are even more worried about startups with massive funding that may leapfrog you. You are trying to make progress but cannot hire enough data scientists, engineers, cyber experts or design thinkers. They are going to fun, young organizations, not the old-school companies with silos, command-and-control leaders and matrix structures that grind decision-making to a halt.

At the same time, many of your current workers are in roles that are slowly becoming obsolete due to automation, you have too many unproductive middle managers, and your digitally unskilled front-line workers are not prepared for a changing world.

These are the challenges we’re hearing from many of our clients, reflecting a crossroad in the global skills crisis. The World Economic Forum <a href=»https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/calling-global-upskilling-movement/» rel=»nofollow»>estimates</a> that more than half of all employees worldwide will need to upskill or reskill by 2025 to embrace the changing nature of jobs. Many organizations are turning to reskilling to build the talent they cannot acquire or productively deploy. And yet a <a href=»https://www.bcg.com/publications/2020/leadership-agile-blindspot» rel=»nofollow»>2020 study by Boston Consulting Group</a> showed that “talent and skills” was the second most underinvested area in corporate transformation efforts.

As companies re-imagine how to scale learning for thousands of people, here are six practical insights based on BCG’s extensive experience supporting more than 100 clients globally.

1. TREAT SKILLING AS A BUSINESS INVESTMENT, NOT AN EXPENSE.

The majority of skilling efforts fail because they are set up to optimize for learning and development (L&amp;D) costs instead of driving real business impact. Leaders should treat skilling as a business investment — an asset that will help produce profits over several years, and with clearly defined key performance indicators.

For example, an Asian real estate firm undertaking a leadership development program designed it by first defining the business objectives: a 50% faster entry into new markets and a twofold increase in land-acquisition goals through faster decision-making.

This completely changed the design of its L&amp;D intervention. Participants went through a hands-on learning intervention, where they were shadowed and coached on how to run their monthly business review meetings differently to achieve their business objectives. The result was a steep jump in their market position and a successful initiative that cascaded to midlevel management.

2. SERVE ‘SALADS’ FOR HEALTHY SKILLING.

Too often today’s skilling programs are offered to employees as a menu of “main course” options. Our experience shows that high-impact reskilling is better achieved through creating appetizing “salads” that blend all these different skills in a specific context.

We worked with the government in Singapore on a large-scale workforce reskilling program to help midcareer professionals move from traditional jobs to data and digital roles. The program needed to address a wide range of skills, from hard skills like problem solving and analytics, to soft skills like stakeholder engagement and communication.

Instead of creating a module for each of these topics, the program focused on projects where all these skills needed to be applied in tandem. The results saw more than 65% of learners pivot to new data and digital roles within just months of completing the program.

3. BRING THE JOY BACK TO LEARNING.

Corporate learning often involves hours of e-modules or Zoom workshops. Companies must re-imagine the learning experience by asking: How do we bring the joy and curiosity of learning that children experience to adult learners?

For instance, a major consumer goods company in India enhanced its midlevel managers’ communication skills by having them shoot and analyze selfie videos. This helped participants become more aware of how they communicate, compared with receiving feedback from a facilitator.

4. POWER UP WITH DATA.

Learning design and delivery is both a science and an art. Data can be used to inform decision-making in every step of the learning journey.

For instance, artificial-intelligence tools can look at an employee’s job experience and career trajectory in order to analyze their skills gap and personalize their learning experience. These tools can also identify pathways for groups of employees whose jobs will be significantly disrupted, and transition them to in-demand roles.

5. ASSEMBLE YOUR OWN SKILLING STACK.

Reskilling at scale for thousands of employees requires significant investment in creating an end-to-end skilling stack — including assessments, skills inventory, content curation, learning technology and analytics, training, delivery, learning experience management, credentialing, and career transition support.

Instead of building this infrastructure from the ground up, companies can now move at speed by “buying” or “renting” through partnerships to assemble their own skilling stack. Your L&amp;D team can distinguish between core commodity skills that are universal and can be sourced externally (for example, learning a new programming language) and where the value for customization can be high (for example, an internal expert sharing which data analytics are most critical in your organization).

6. EMPOWER EMPLOYEES TO LEARN.

Data from BCG’s <a href=»https://www.bcg.com/publications/2021/decoding-global-trends-reskilling-career-paths» rel=»nofollow»>“Decoding Global Talent” report</a> shows that 68% of workers worldwide are ready to retrain for new careers to stay competitive. Employers should empower their employees with the right tools, flexible resources and a supportive environment.

For example, BCG empowers its consultants to stay relevant by designing their own learning intervention, backed by an annual budget for it. This has led to many creative learning paths — for example, collaborations on public-sector initiatives, codesigning with startups, immersion trips to completely different business environments and more.

+++

By reimagining the traditional approaches to skilling, business and human resources leaders can take timely action to prepare their workforces for the future. Organizations have a choice: create a competitive advantage though skilling or run the imminent risk of falling behind.