Your talents are waiting to evolve! How can you encourage skills development?

It's in every company's interest to maintain the relationship they have with their employees over time. Keeping your employees means keeping all their expertise within your company... and avoiding costly recruitment!

It's important to support them as they develop their skills, so that they feel more committed to the organisation's project over the long term. The employer, for his part, also reaps the benefits: he has human resources at the cutting edge of skills.

But what exactly is the company's role in this work, and how can it develop its employees?

We'll explain the definition, the method and the advice you need to help your teams succeed!

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Up-skilling: the definition

Up-skilling refers to the process by which an employee acquires new qualifications, with the aim of :

• improve their day-to-day performance ;
• being entrusted with new duties.

☝️Il is therefore often a prerequisite for advancement within the company, which in turn fosters job satisfaction.

Through daily practice, monitoring and exchanges with colleagues, employees are constantly broadening their knowledge. However, the increase in skills can be largely taken care of by the employer, who then involves it in training and integrates it into its GPEC approach.

💡 Key points to bear in mind: upgrading skills involves both :

• hard skills, i.e. technical and specific know-how (computer programming, accounting, project management, mastery of specific software, etc.) ;
• soft skills, which are more behavioural skills (communication, creativity, leadership, empathy, etc.).

The benefits of upgrading skills

For employees

Up-skilling offers employees the chance to develop within the company, by opening up new career opportunities. Not to mention the fact that the positions they can fill with their new qualifications are often better paid 🤑.

What's more, by seeing that their employer is investing in their development, employees feel more committed and invested.

In short, upskilling is a clear driver of well-being at work.

For the company

The company, for its part, can count on more efficient employees.

Up-skilling also ensures that :

• rapid access to the know-how you need to stay competitive and innovative;
• without the need for costly and time-consuming recruitment.

👉 It's impossible not to think of the need to upgrade skills in new technologies, which many employees still lack. Thanks to levers such as training, organisations are helping their staff to progress in this area, so that they can better face up to the reality of the market.

💡 Good to know: improving skills is one of the objectives of the Avenir Professionnel law. It stipulates that the employer is obliged to put in place actions to this end, including training and skills assessments.

There are 6 steps to help you develop your skills?

Step 1: Make skills development part of an ongoing process

First of all, it's important to stress that an effective skills development process is not a one-off job that HR only has to tackle a few times a year, at the time of the annual appraisal, for example.

And with good reason: it's important for companies to remain agile if they are to adapt quickly to the constant changes in the world of work!

👉 So you need to monitor skills development on an ongoing basis, for example through regular feedback. This way, you can quickly detect if an employee needs to broaden his or her field of knowledge.

Step 2: Assess skills needs within the company

This involves assessing the needs of the company and those of the employees in parallel, with a view to correlating them.

On the employee side

Define a career plan with them, taking into account not only their aspirations but also their current qualifications. It's best to capitalise on their strengths (start from a solid base) to speed up the process of upgrading their skills.

We also advise you to carry out skills assessments, which are a good way of identifying employees' weak points and the areas for improvement that go with them.

On the company side

The first thing you need to do is get in touch with management! This is the only way you can find out what the strategy is going to be, so you can identify the skills that are essential to its deployment, as well as any gaps.

But that's not all! To remain competitive, you need to anticipate future needs arising from changes in your sector (technological, societal, regulatory, etc.).

Step 3: Set the right objectives

If you think about it, skills development is a lifelong process.

However, in the context of a company project, it is important to clearly define the development objectives to be achieved for each employee.

These guarantee the success of the process (you know where you're going), but also, and above all, ensure that they are perfectly aligned with the company's needs.

☝️ Objectives, yes, but SMART objectives please, i.e. both :

• Specific,
• Measurable
• Attainable,
• Realistic,
• Time-bound.

Step 4: Implement the skills development plan

It's time for the company to devise a plan in line with the predefined objectives.

💡 To help you do this, use a skills development table that lists:

• the company's needs ;
• the various resources/actions to be mobilised to meet them (training in particular);
• the length of time over which these actions will be spread out.

👉 Example of a skills development plan :

Step 5: Encourage other levers

Training is not the only way to help your employees grow. We even advise you to encourage other levers, in particular :

• sharing experience and practices between employees ;
• mentoring or coaching programmes
• developing specific assignments to acquire new skills in a given context;
• making resources available (e.g. webinars).

Step 6: Monitor and adjust your skills development plan

It's time to check whether the predefined objectives have been achieved. But how do you assess your skills development?

There are a number of ways you can go about this: regularly reviewing the performance associated with a position, running technical tests to measure progress in concrete terms, etc.

👉 We also advise you to gather feedback from employees. This method has two benefits:

• employees have the opportunity to reflect on their progress and their needs ;
• on your side, you detect areas for improvement in your skills development approach.

💡 Good to know: the whole process of upgrading skills can be greatly facilitated by the use of software, capable of automating a large proportion of the actions. What's more, they centralise all the necessary data.

For example, Skeely's GPEC solution enables you to understand the skills of your employees, thanks to a global mapping, and then to plan the actions to be deployed to make up for any shortcomings. It also includes functions for setting up and monitoring personalised training plans.

7 tips for improving the skills development process

1. Communicate sufficiently. Appropriate communication helps to give meaning to skills upgrading, explaining to employees why the company needs them to expand their knowledge of a particular subject. It's the key to gaining their confidence!
   
   
2. Encourage a culture of continuous learning. Work to create an environment where development is encouraged and valued by all levels of the organisation.
   
   
3. Provide the necessary funding. Upgrading an employee's skills generates costs. Hence the importance of obtaining management support for such projects.
   
   
4. Reward employees. While we're on the subject of money... let's face it, one of the main reasons why an employee wants to progress in their career is the prospect of a pay rise!
   
   
5. Adapt training to individual learning styles. Recognise that every employee is unique. So, if possible, offer a variety of training options to suit all profiles.
   
   
6. Follow industry trends. In other words, stay abreast of changes in the industry so that you can adapt your development programmes accordingly.
   
   
7. Lead by example! Even in HR and management, there are always new things to learn. So be ready to learn as soon as you need to.

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Skills development in brief

Combined with GPEC, skills upgrading is essential for any company that wants to stay in the race. Especially as your competitors won't be waiting for you! What's more, it's an excellent way of securing the loyalty of your talent, through the promise of great career prospects.

But for skills development to work, it has to be part of an ongoing, structured process. The good news is that this work is made much easier by the use of dedicated software, which saves HR time and reduces the risk of oversights.

Finally, we advise you to develop an environment that encourages exchanges, even informal ones. You always learn from others... even in a simple conversation at the coffee machine 😉.