What Is Upskilling? 5 Reasons to Invest in It

By Randy Quarin, Co-Founder & Emerging Technology Recruiter 

Companies across a variety of industries are suffering from skill gaps. While hiring is the obvious option to fill skill gaps, current market conditions have made it difficult for companies to recruit and hire top talent to fill these gaps. Your top competitors are likely experiencing the same issues, competing for the same talent, making it challenging to find the right person, with the right skills, to fill the void.

The other effective option to fill skill gaps is to invest in upskilling.

What Is Upskilling?

Upskilling is the process of improving the skills of your employees. Investing in training, coaching, and professional development to help employees add new skills and capabilities is vital to close skill gaps. Upskilling can help prepare team members for promotions and place more focus on internal development over hiring to improve the organization.

5 Reasons Why You Should Invest in Upskilling

Employees have never had more career options. Investing in upskilling helps you attract and keep your talent in house. Here are some of the top reasons to invest in upskilling:

• Reduce recruitment costs: Training and onboarding costs are expensive. It costs more money to hire and train a new employee than it does to offer training and upskill current staff. Upskilling takes less time and reduces other costs associated with hiring from outside the organization to fill a skill gap.
• Keep up with industry trends: Upskilling allows your employees to more easily stay on top of new trends, industry developments, and new business practices. This helps your company become more adaptive and agile.

• Improve employee engagement: Your employees want professional development and training. Providing it to them will keep them more engaged, help them do their job better and help them improve performance.
• Prepare employees for internal career moves: Upskilling helps your employees not only develop skills they need for their current role, but also develop additional skills that can be used if they are promoted. It helps ease the transition to new roles internally.
• Reduce employee turnover: When you invest in your employees, they are more likely to remain loyal and stay long term. This will help reduce employee turnover, reduce recruiting costs, improve engagement and provide a greater return on your investment in your team.

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IQ PARTNERS is an Executive Search & Recruitment firm supporting clients across the country. We help companies hire better, hire less & retain more. We have specialist teams of recruiters in Executive Search / Board & C-Suite, Technology, Media, Digital & Marketing, Accounting & Finance, Financial Services & Insurance, Cannabis, Startup, Data Science, Consumer, eCommerce & Retail, Operations & HR, Manufacturing, Supply Chain & Engineering, Legal & Professional Services, Pharmaceutical & Life Sciences, and Sales. IQ PARTNERS has its head office in Toronto and operates internationally via Aravati Global Search Network. Click here to view current job openings and to register with us.