Upskilling and Reskilling
Upskilling and reskilling their workforce has become a key concern for many companies and CEOs. Skills are driving employee recruitment much more than qualifications. At the same time, AI is changing the skills that companies will need in future, the skill mix of their workforce, where existing jobs will disappear and new ones be created.
No-one knows how this will play out yet, or how long it will take for everything to become clear.
Apart from the disruptive effect of AI on individual business functions, the changes will have profound impacts for the Human Resources and Learning and Development (L&D) Departments. Talent recruitment, development, and management will become much more critical than at any time in the past. It will be years before the availability of AI skilled workers is enough to meet every company’s needs. Competition for other company’s skilled workers will be tough, and attrition could grow in companies that do not address this early enough.
Talent development will become something companies need to do, in varying degrees, for every employee that you wish to stay with the company.
Martec's approach to upskilling and reskilling is based on a year’s deep research into this whole area. We have documented a comprehensive approach to planning upskilling and reskilling for those that need it, progressing from entry level positions to top management, spreading the upskilling burden through individuals’ career paths, aiming to have a pool of people ready to fill the next level positions as vacancies are created. For square pegs in round holes - people that are worth keeping, sideways moves can be trained for, to help you hold on to people with potential value to the business, who may not be in the right spot just now.
Our approach will help L&D, in conjunction with Finance:
- Produce accurate costings for the necessary investment
- Produce a well-developed series of estimates of the benefits and show the estimated ROI in terms of expected profit increase, change in the balance sheet, improvements in free cash flow and the Internal Rate of Return.
For more information visit our Upskilling and Reskilling Toolkit page.
For individuals looking to maximize their career prospects, our career path maps will guide you to where you might wish to develop your career and the steps you might take to do it. Find the role that you are in now, or shortly to start, and study the learning path for that role. Our learning path pages are in the process of being revised, so please feel free to contact us to request the updated one you need. Currently these are available for Buying & Merchandising and Store Operations.
How the Retail and Consumer Goods Knowledge Bank Supports Upskilling
As an example, the spreadsheet below shows how Martec defines the skills or competencies needed for a typical Assistant Merchandiser role. Individual companies can customize this template as necessary and add extra items where they have unique requirements. (We often assist in this).
The purpose of this email is to highlight how the knowledge bank plays an important role in initiatives to upskill or reskill staff members.
If you are an individual learner, each class is licensed for a limited period of study. The Knowledge Bank is included free of charge as an additional resource and is provided on a 12-month licence. If you do not license any classes, you may still access the Knowledge Bank independently on a renewable 12-month licence.
Corporate e-learning licensees also receive complimentary access to the Knowledge Bank for the duration of their class licence. Once your learning objectives have been met, you may continue to license the Knowledge Bank on its own, providing ongoing support, opportunities for revision, and access to updated and newly released job aids to help maintain your productivity gains.
You can also build internal applications or tools, which include links to educational material and other tools in the knowledge bank, to help maximize their productivity potential.
To evaluate the usefulness of our Retail and Consumer Goods Industry Knowledge Bank in more detail, take advantage of our free trial. Just click here and enter free trial in the message box.
If you would like an overview of our approach to upskilling your teams, watch this 3-minute video.