'People deserve more community-based, exciting, curiosity-driven learning experiences'
With many workers believing that upskilling is critical to progress in their careers, employers have the responsibility to provide workers with opportunities to better themselves, according to one expert.
There are so many benefits for employers, and yet so many of them don't think to invest time and resources to upskill workers, says Sarah Stockdale, CEO and founder, Growclass, in talking with Human Resources Director.
“The main benefit is that you have a workforce that understands tools in the year that they're operating in.”
While it’s great to have workers who learned a lot during their college days, the skills that workers need to be successful change, she says.
“If you learned marketing in college 10 years ago, you don't have relevant skills for the current job that you are operating in.
“You'll probably have to learn those on your own and in real time by failing in your workplace over and over and over again, until you figure out how to do it, which is a great way to learn. But it takes a long time. And if organizations invest time and resources and are thoughtful about upskilling their employees, they're going to see more productive people.”
Overall, 60% of Canadians believe upskilling is very important for advancing their careers, reports Growclass.
Canadians feel communication and interpersonal skills are the most important areas to upskill in the next 12 months (60%), followed by leadership and management (48%) skills, according to Growclass.
“What folks are starting to find is that those are not skills that are taught in traditional academic institutions, and they're also not easily learned on your own online,” says Stockdale.
“If you are looking to upskill in very specific hard skills areas, you might be able to go and kind of get the basics from courses that you find online… You can't learn communication and interpersonal skills that way, and you can't learn leadership and management that way.”
Learning those skills requires that employees spend more focused time with coaches and experts, she says.
And while artificial intelligence (AI) has been front and center in nearly all organizations these days, “you can't progress in any organization if you can't clearly communicate your work, your value, your team's work, and manage people effectively,” says Stockdale.
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That does not mean that workers are putting artificial intelligence (AI) at the bottom of the list when it comes to their learning objectives, says Stockdale.
“AI is still an incredibly important part of upskilling, and we saw 37% of Canadians saying that they need upskilling in AI. I think there's also an education gap with understanding how AI is going to impact their workplaces and their work. We're seeing a huge gap in women adopting AI into the workplace.
“I think there's just a slight lag. And if we do this survey again in a year, we're going to see AI rise.”
AI can also be a powerful tool in helping workers upskill, she says.
“We're looking to AI to figure out how to bridge gaps in education and to personalize things for folks… There are really interesting ways that we can use these tools to make education more personal, to make it more global, and to bridge gaps when humans can't immediately jump on a call and help you.
“If there's a way that we can get you that help that is still almost as effective until [a trainer] can get back online [and provide what learners need], then we're going to try.”
The main thing for employers to do is not to treat upskilling for workers as an “afterthought,” says Stockdale.
“It really needs to be an essential component to any workplace that wants to have a happy workforce that can think critically and creatively and use tools in the year that you are working in, not ones from, you know, potentially 10 years ago. And education doesn't stop after university.”
If employers don't provide a professional education program for workers, it's going to be purely “learning by failure” for workers, she says.
That’s “a painful and lonely way to learn”.
“People deserve more community-based, exciting, curiosity-driven learning experiences,” says Stockdale.
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