The constant thing about life is that it’s constantly changing. Jobs and the career landscape are no exception. Reskilling and upskilling is a necessary activity that helps individuals and organisations remain relevant in today’s competitive marketplace. This article will show you the best ways to upskill on a budget. Learning and developing new skills can propel career advancements and improve your performance. Upskilling is a worthwhile investment but not everyone knows what skills they need to develop, where to go to upskill, or the best ways to do so.
What is meant by upskilling?
Upskilling is best described as the process of taking additional education and training to build on and grow your current skill set. It’s a growing trend in organisations and among individuals to go through training, and development opportunities to expand an employee’s workplace skills and help minimise skill shortages. A few examples of training can include attending workshops, and seminars, taking courses, or learning new skills for a different role.
Why upskilling is important
It’s no secret that the workplace is constantly changing. New technological advancements mean industries are developing at a rapid pace. These new developments also create skills gaps in the workforce if continuous learning is not prioritised.
Hiring managers face increasing pressure to meet the demands of the changing trends by providing organisations with candidates that are skilled and up to the task to meet the demands. However, a 2020 report by the US Chamber Foundation found that 74% of hiring managers said that there is a lack of skilled employees entering the workforce in the last few years. Additionally, competencies are gaining traction in the preferred skills recruiters look for as opposed to degrees.
Benefits of upskilling
There are many advantages to upskilling and we’ll discuss a few of these below.
- Salary increases
Upskilling puts you in a position to request a raise from your employer. you can showcase your newly developed and crafted skills to your employer and demonstrate the benefit these will bring to the company. Added to this, the new skills will allow you to take on more roles and duties and a salary increase will reflect your growth.
- Career change
After reskilling and upskilling, you can make a dream career change, apply for, and land a promotion, or change companies if necessary. You set yourself up for new opportunities and provide you leverage to your resume to take your career to the next level.
- Enhanced job satisfaction
Oftentimes after years in one role doing the same thing, you can get bored and lose your passion and motivation. Acquiring new skills is a challenge, a learning opportunity, and it reignites your love for your job. When you learn new skills, you feel more productive, and satisfied, bolster your workplace morale, and inject some life into the monotony that can come with an 8-4.
Best ways to upskill on a budget
- Repurpose existing training programmes
Companies can take advantage of existing training programmes they have used and repurpose them with updated content and answer some of the common questions or mistakes they see in the workplace. This can look like breaking down longer training into shorter weekly courses, converting material into infographics, and hosting webinars. lunch and learns for your team, or schedule podcast listening sessions.
- Guided learning
Training and upskilling employees cost money. But in some cases, the staff don’t know how to implement their learnings into their day-to-day activities. Companies can pair employees with supervisors who can answer questions, review what they’ve learned, and help them connect it to their role.
- Job shadowing or mentoring
Another way to upskill on a budget is to utilise in-house resources. As an employer, you can use the expertise and knowledge that senior employees have to assist in providing learning and development to junior staff. Those who have decades of experience and have undergone their own training can be tasked with sharing their knowledge either by job shadowing or being mentors to new recruits. Furthermore, mentoring is an interactive training method, and this allows young professionals to see the skills in action in a structured way and later pass on what they have learned to others joining the business.
- Broaden your perspectives about learning and development
Learning and development are not limited to a classroom. Instead, it can incorporate many things like TED Talks, listening to podcasts, attending conferences, inviting speakers to the workplace to give special talks to the team, short masterclasses, and other options that don’t cost a lot of money or take up a lot of time. The option you choose will depend on the scope of the learning required and your various business needs.
Added to these options, you can explore government-funded training programmes to see which ones you qualify for. Or join small business organisations that provide skills training and development to companies of a certain size.
- Online learning
Online learning platforms like Alison offer a variety of free courses to help individuals and corporations build skills in a manner that they find suitable. If you are a business owner you will need to identify what your goals and requirements are, where the skills gap is, and then create a plan to bridge that gap.
You can sign up with a learning partner, utilising a learning management system (LMS) where you have the option to curate your own individualised learning paths for your staff based on the needs of your organisation. Alison’s powerful library of 4,000+ online courses encourages proactive life-long continuous upskilling and learning with certificates and badges.
Design custom learning paths with Alison’s FLMS
Alison’s Free LMS (FLMS) is quick and easy to set up, you can monitor your staff’s progress and the learning paths are flexible and self-paced, ideal for different learning styles. Additionally, by upskilling, you empower yourself and your employees to greater productivity by acquiring on-trend and necessary skills. Furthermore, it has an extensive collection of free online courses that allow corporates, schools and non-profits to design custom learning paths for their personnel based on the demands of their business.
- Number of team members: unlimited
- Set-up time: quick and easy set-up process
- Aggregate and individual reporting: set up your group’s training progress with a choice of daily, weekly, or monthly reports, you can keep track of the academic progress your team makes.
Create a free LMS for your organisation in three simple steps
- Enter your organisation’s information and logo
- Select courses either by category, industry or tag from our library of 4,000+ courses.
- Share the URL of your FLMS with your intended users
To future-proof your business and ensure you remain competitive, you should take note of the predicted skills that will be in high demand in the next decade and work on introducing these into your workplace skills development programme.
