“Upskilling” is now understood to be a bulwark against future business and professional decline. It’s firmly established that workers across almost every industry (but especially in a few select sectors) want to unlearn and relearn new, essential skills that will help them continue to earn a good keep and stay in work. 

Upskilling and Reskilling have become an acutely personal and business necessity in the wake of the pandemic. Upskilling has, in this context, become a byword for ensuring job security. 

• “The pandemic has been an accelerant—speeding up digitization, e-commerce and automation. And as a result, even more people are now exposed to job displacement than before”.
• “Between 400 million and 800 million workers around the world could be displaced by automation by 2030”.
• “A report by the Learning & Work Institute shows that according to 92% of businesses, digital skills are key”.
• “Employers expect that by 2025…85 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labour between humans and machines, while 97 million new roles may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms”.

In short, upskilling is mostly desired because the winds of business change are blowing. While much of the focus has been on the worry of employee obsolescence as the driving factor behind the push for new digital skills, there is huge scope for employment opportunities and career growth in new industries and jobs.

However, a word of warning for recruiters who want to use professional L&D as your reskilling USP – a target word for consideration in one of the above quotes is “could be displaced”.

There is no uniform automotive or digital wave of change that will hit each industry at the same time. For some, it’s already occurring. For others, change will be negligible or slow-moving.

Here is where we want to draw a pretty firm line in the ground: “upskilling” as a term, even as an entire HR sub-industry, is an incredibly large arena of business investment. Therefore, the development of your staff cannot be haphazard – it needs to be targeted, affordable, meaningful, and market-relevant.

Above all else, you need to have complete and total employee buy-in: there is no point in accelerating L&D programs if the outcomes don’t help your people. 

This, in essence, makes upskilling less of a hard skills development plan, and more of a holistic, cultural awakening.

This is where employers have a unique opportunity. Employers can reframe the meaning and vitality of reskilling in personal, employer-specific ways, and attach reskilling initiatives to business, personal, and societal improvements that mean something to your industry and to your people. 

This not only helps your skillset within work but improves your EVP and employer brand and helps give your team a sense of continual value in their development.

So where do we start?

We think it best to focus on the two main pillars of upskilling – what hard skills and what soft skills will most employees absolutely need in the future?

Hard Skills – Digital Skills

This is close to our heart – as Rectec is a digital tool, created expressly to make recruitment CRM and ATS comparisons rapidly available, hyper-relevant and completely digital, we intimately understand the usefulness and power of digital skills and the power of well-curated recruitment tech platforms.

However, our platform can only work with recruiters who understand how ATS efficiencies augment and improve the real job of recruitment – building human relationships and establishing trust between experts in certain fields. 

However, we digress – digital skills are the one “hard skill” employees desire and employers require. 

• “Workers want more digital skills, more inclusivity, and more flexibility…In one of the largest global surveys of workers (workers want to) learn new digital skills and…quickly adapt to remote work. Yet many people think their job is at risk, and half of all respondents feel they’ve missed out on career opportunities or training due to discrimination” – PwC.
• “For UK employers, reskilling would yield positive economic returns in about three-quarters of cases…more than 90 per cent of the UK workforce will need to be trained” – McKinsey.

Soft Skills – Communication

While hard skills may be the superstructure of future-proofing business, Soft Skills are the underlay, the insulation, the facade and the foundations of making sure those hard skills can be deployed and sustainably used. 

According to Pertemps, the most in-demand soft skills for our future of work are:

• Complex problem-solving
• Critical thinking
• Creativity
• People management
• Coordinating with others
• Emotional intelligence
• Judgement and decision-making
• Service orientation
• Negotiation
• Cognitive flexibility

In short, empathetic, open communication and flexibility of working approach seem to be the height of soft skill requirements. 

Hard and Soft skills complement each other. Considering the iterative, multidisciplinary approach of creating digital tools, communication, problem-solving, and coordination of teamwork are just as important as raw coding skills. 

Summary

Upskilling is urgently necessary, professionally demanded and essential for business security. But upskilling raw hard skills alone won’t guarantee an effective workforce or future proof business. 

There have to be commitments to understanding the essential role soft skills play in your business model. Employers need to understand the importance of confidence-building as workers face the existential threat of obsolescence. 

Employers have a window of opportunity to help their people through hard skills upgrade strategies, whilst simultaneously focusing on the long term holistic improvements soft skills development offers both worker and employer.

A quick, responsive process is what you need to attract and engage the best talent.

At Rectec we help organisations to find the best Applicant Tracking System or best Recruitment CRM to suit your needs, accompanied by our unique complementary technology marketplace, to help you build the perfect recruitment tech stack for your business.

You can click here to register for Rectec Compare – and best of all, it’s completely free of charge.

The post How to start upskilling your workforce, and why it’s so important. appeared first on Rectec.

While our primary service, Rectect Compare, gives recruiters the chance to compare recruitment software from our partnerships with ATS and recruitment CRM vendors, behind it lies a resolute mission: to help recruitment leaders utilise great tech to connect with, communicate with, and hire talented people. ATS and recruitment CRM comparison becomes a metaphor for effective talent comparison.

When broken down into its constituent parts, we like to think we also make the process of job seeking easier and fairer too.

We do this in two ways – via our vendor partnerships, ATS, and recruitment CRM comparison services (which helps employers perfect their talent acquisition and build more agile, more efficient cultures of hiring), and through a more holistic understanding of recruitment, the culture of work, and what candidates want from a modern workplace and career.

Our founder Rob spent 15 years working in frontline recruitment, recruitment tech integration, HR, talent acquisition and personnel management, in both in-house rec and agency. He knows his way around hiring, recruitment strategies, and HR leadership, and has used that to better interrogate and highlight exactly what features of what applicant tracking system and CRM platforms provide the most value to employers and HR teams in any industry.

This is the foundation of Rectec – a true appreciation, and long serving experience, of recruiting.

With that in mind, we wanted to share our advice on using failure to fuel success, especially when it comes to career stalling, or feeling like a failure in work.

If the last couple of years have taught the recruiting world anything it’s that no job seeking trend stays fixed for long, and that many millions of workers across almost every industry have spent a lot of time soul searching in the wake of COVID-19, lockdowns, isolation and, in some awful circumstances, redundancy.

Hence, the power and fury of the global Great Resignation.

The current job market can seem overwhelming for a job seeker – with so many employers clamouring for talent, and so many recruiters working overtime to serve their client base from a dwindling talent pool, the market can, rather conversely, create a sense of waywardness and panic. And, when you’re reeling from the feeling that your current job isn’t right for you, or that you’re failing in your current career, the market can feel even less welcoming and more impersonal.

But from a feeling of failure can come the bloom of success. It takes a bit of self belief, a little bit of planning, and some bravery. But from it, you can secure a happier future. Here’s how:

The world isn’t against you. Work with it!

When you feel like you’re on the wrong path in your career it can feel like work, and the environment and cultures of your current work, are set up to make you fail.

Our advice is to rise above resentment and focus on the things you can fix, and things you can’t.

• Things you can fix – like self-awareness, practising self-mastery, manifesting new paths and futures, creating vision boards – focus the mind and create positive patterns of thought and action.
• Things you can’t fix – the culture of your boss and workplace, the opinions of other work colleagues, fixed attitudes to your work and your person – should be discarded.

Then you have a basis for positive action. You have a mindset based on growth – the visceral, literal things you can touch and feel, that you have control over and that you can change – they form the basis of your new job seeking mindset.

The end result of discarding this resentment from your mind is a more positive mental framework to find what does make you happy in work. The last thing you want to do is reach out into the live employers market with a chip on your shoulder and negativity in your heart.

Stay focused on what you can change, and forget the rest.

Analyse opportunity by career proximity

What we mean by this is look at your next step systematically, rather than chucking a hail mary CV into a jobs board. While that strategy may work in filling your inbox with recruiter platitudes and bad job offers, it doesn’t offer quality reassurance that your next move is the right move.

What you need to do is build a job seeking growth mindset – that means analysing opportunity from the position of betterment, rather than escape from your current role.

So, we advise you analyse opportunity – literally make a list through research, recruiter outreach, and job board searching – through three “career proximity and consideration” lenses:

• Nearby – what opportunities does your current job – or competitors within your sector – have that may move your career in the right way
  • Considerations: Is this a sector you still want to work in? What are your new goals?
• Closeby – what opportunities are in your area, industry or network that may be of interest? This includes lateral career moves, for example from Sales into Customer Service.
  • Considerations: Is this where you want to work? What do you need to work on skillswise to make a lateral move?
• Far away – what completely outlier opportunities exist that you have a desire to know more about, but don’t know anything about?
  • Considerations: do these opportunities engage you or excite you? Can you commit to a complete change of working environment?

Communicate often, diligently, and widely

No matter where you feel opportunity lies in relation to your career proximity, communication is the vehicle in which you create reality from opportunity.

It sounds like such a basic, bog standard statement but diligence is the key here. And as much as we advocate for great tech and innovation, there is no replacing or automating a true quality recruiters relationship.

Diligence means following your proximity analysis and choosing to commit to communicating consistently with people within your chosen network, be that nearby networks of co-professionals in your line of work, or far away networks.

Be patient with yourself, and be kind to yourself – use communication to open the door, and let your personality shine. Take it from us – almost every employer in the UK and beyond wants to engage new talent, so use that as your confidence builder. There has never been a better time to drop an email into an HR team’s inbox and build rapport.

Finally, trust the process – there will be opportunities that fall through the cracks, and there will be heartbreaking last minute about-turns from great employers who will choose another person over you for that final spot on the team. What the above does is simply puts you in the right mindset to manifest success, and un-stall your career progress. That is the process!

A quick, responsive process is what you need to attract and engage the best talent.

At Rectec we help organisations to find the best Applicant Tracking System or best Recruitment CRM to suit your needs, accompanied by our unique complimentary tech marketplace, to help you build the perfect recruitment tech stack for your business.

You can click here to register for Rectec Compare – and best of all, it’s completely free of charge.

The post How to succeed at failure – a guide for job seekers suffering from career halting. appeared first on Rectec.