When you create a company, you fully invest. You are in it for the long run, so you invest in infrastructure, qualified professionals, and much more. But on the way, as time goes by, you notice that your office needs to be painted again because the paint seems to be deteriorating; or maybe it is the bathroom that needs a fix, and you need to re-invest.
A fully functioning and thriving company demands constant re-investing. And just like your infrastructure might require a little attention through the years to maintain or even improve its state; your talent might need just the same.
How many times have you felt like you found the perfect team, the people you want to constitute your company, and suddenly, times change, and it seems like you need to renew your talent stock? It can be hard to maintain even the greatest teams.
Sometimes it is a retention problem, and your amazing talent feels like there are new and better opportunities for them elsewhere; and some other times, it is an updating problem. It happens that your craft evolves with time and your company doesn’t seem to be keeping up with the latest techniques and general advancements.
But worry not, since this solution might help with all those problems. Have you heard the term upskilling? and please don’t confuse it with reskilling, since they have separate meanings. Though they both imply a learning process, they have different goals.
Reskilling is like having cashiers at a restaurant and teaching them to wait tables; it is about training your staff to do a different job. To define upskilling, we like Susan R. Vroman’s definition that says “Upskilling is a longer-term investment in augmenting the knowledge, skills, and competencies that help employees advance their careers”.
And this investment, just like infrastructure, is a long-term one that needs to be constant and reviewed in time. But, in case you require a little more convincing, here are some reasons why you should start upskilling your team as soon as possible.
Keep Up Your Growth Pace
Nowadays all fields are changing, growing, and developing at an incredibly rapid pace. If you want your company to stay at the top, you need to match that growth pace as much as you can.
Whether your company works with design and you need to stay updated with the new digital art tools and upskill your teams on that; or maybe you just need to keep up with the latest trends and augment your staff’s marketing knowledge, upskilling is your game.
You will be adding to your company’s culture a learning habit that can be a priority for further development. It can foster a growth mindset environment where your team feels safe to go above and beyond for what they believe they can do best.
By selecting carefully what needs to be upskilled, you will be designing the top-class professionals you want to have on your team and using that to grow in the right direction.
Fill Skills Gaps At The Company
When you as a company are providing the learning experience or at least selecting it, you can make it adequate to your company’s specific needs. Soft skills can make a difference and they even reflect on the product and team’s performance.
You should wonder, what about non-instrumental skills? Perhaps your team needs a hand with time management. All you need to do is a quick diagnosis, look around, ask around, identify what’s missing or what could be better, and make it better.
It is also an investment to foster teamwork, train problem-solving skills, or send your leaders and managers to a leadership workshop. These gaps can be as detrimental to a company as hard skills.
So, work smarter by adjusting these skills in people you already have committed to the company. It is faster and cheaper, and almost inevitable. You might find someone who seems like the perfect fit for the role but, on a daily is a pain to work with.
Invest In The Talent You Already Believe In
Remember that your team is a resource you already value. Once upon a time, you saw these people’s resumes, contacted them, welcomed them, onboarded them, and most importantly, believed in them. Your team was already approved by your board of recruiters and HR specialists.
You already know the quality of their work and you have seen how their potential can be developed. Those are assets and must be acknowledged as that.
Now imagine that you have this whole set of talented people you already find capable and trustworthy, and suddenly the winds change and demand you to improve. If you need to invest in training and knowledge, why not train these people you have grown with? At the end of the day, they are the ones that brought you to this point.
The human part is a very difficult one in every workplace to achieve harmony. You assign a group of qualified professionals to a project and they won’t need exclusively the skills to perform the job; they will also need communication skills, the willingness to cooperate with one another, and more.
So, If you already have a team that works, don’t waste your time creating one from scratch. If you believe in your team’s talent, this is a way to help them grow.
Show Them You Care
For sure, if you hired them it is because you saw something in them. But do they know you care, or does it seem like a lucky strike that they got the job? Upskilling your team, and investing in them is a great way to show them that you care about their career development.
Here at Freelance Latin America, we create personal development plans with our freelancers to help them grow toward where they want to grow. We also have our ally brand, Appoint Pros, where we have top-class training available for constantly upskilling our teams.
Which has become an asset for us, they are a reliable source of trusted mentorships for our professionals. We believe in them and they believe in us, so it is always, as we like, a win-win deal with them.
Upskilling will certainly increase motivation among your team members; they will know and feel that they are valued, and an increase in motivation will reflect productivity and performance, too.
By doing this, the sense of belonging could go deeper, strengthening the loyalty to the company, and therefore increasing the employee retention rate of the company.
Try to see it as becoming the company where no one wants to miss out on their opportunity to keep on growing.
Save Money
You might be thinking, but hey I would be investing money in the training of the team’s skills. But that investment seems like another kind and can’t be compared with the costs of recruiting, hiring, and training a new employee. With your team, you already did all of that, so no need to repeat that sometimes painful process of selecting a new soul to integrate into the pre-existing structure of our teams.
Think about all you go through when a good team member decides to leave the company. The costs of replacing that position can take up a very big financial investment, to be precise, it could be around one and a half or even twice the annual salary of the employee.
So, investing in a functioning upskilling program can help you work around new hires’ costs, and increase employee retention. These days, losing good talent seems like a luxury not everyone can afford.
Be Ready For Everything
Constant upskilling instills a culture of learning and growth. Those are valuable things to create at a company since they bring so much to the table. A learning culture and a growth mindset are the foundation of most improvement plans. If you have those things, the sky’s the limit.
Your team will learn from their successes and failures, and they will be more resilient and thrive under any circumstances. You need a team that learns to deal with everyday problems and emerging changes in the craft. And what better way to do so?
When you have this learning culture, you are constantly training for the challenges you regularly face and also the unknown ones. Like saying goodbye to a valuable team member. Of course, we want our talent to stay with us, and we do the best we can to provide them with the environment they need to grow and feel comfortable in, but we can’t force them to stay if they decide to leave.
Some companies end up having a dependent relationship with their leaders, or even team members. They have these trusted leaders who know the job pretty well, but there is no one to step up for the job if they are not there anymore.
By constantly upskilling your team you will be also preparing them to face new challenges and ascend within the company. You can start mentoring your future leaders and have them lead a project or two, so they can put their skills to practice. Remember, everyone is important, but no one should be indispensable. The show must go on.
Attract Top Talent
When you are on the quest to find new talent for a project, you surely ask many questions during the interview and carefully evaluate their resume and references to make sure that they are the best option for you.
But don’t forget that your candidates are doing the exact same thing as you, they want to know your values, your company’s culture, and what you offer in general, not only when it comes to salary. The great talent that you are looking for is probably looking for a company where they are given the opportunity to grow.
The top professionals you want are ambitious, driven, and have a growth mindset; and to those people, it is key to be part of a company where they can develop their careers and add value.
You could add learning to your hiring process and talk about your upskilling programs and your company’s culture so you can make sure that you are letting in someone who values it and will be the right fit for your learning culture.
As an outsourcing company, we connect freelancers with many different clients, but we believe in creating a team within our freelancers and investing in them by upskilling workshops every month with a new topic, whether is soft skills with our amazing HR team, or consulting with our friends at Appoint Pros, we make the habit of constant improvement. We believe in having the best talent, so we treat them just like that by investing in them.
Upskilling has countless benefits, this was only our top pick to make it simple to see that it is the path to go. The talent you have is already an asset, and you decide whether you want to strengthen it or leave it as it is. But let us tell you that you won’t regret choosing to upskill them.
Your team will be happier by feeling valued and those happy workers will lead to happy customers and so on. So wait no more, start showing interest in your teams’ development, encourage them to learn, foster a growth environment, and never forget the balance.
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See more articles by Laura Navarro.
