By: Shawna Simcik

Demands of competition, economic strains, and the rapid pace of change are forcing companies to make quick strategic changes. With these changes in strategy, employee positions need to evolve with company demands. As a business, you have two choices in this situation, reduce headcount and rehire for the new skills or uplevel the skill set of our current team members. A reduction of headcount due to a lack of skills could damage your reputation and no one wants to work for a company that doesn’t invest in its employees’ career and leadership development.

You might have heard these words a lot recently, but what do they mean? While both imply learning new skills, there are slight differences.

Upskilling is the most common in an organization. Simply put, organizations use training and leadership development to train the workforce to acquire new skills. An example might be an organization investing in manager training to support an emerging leader in how to effectively give feedback during performance reviews.

Reskilling is less common, but the benefits of supporting an individual to learn new skills to enter an entirely new field may support the retention of an employee if their position is redundant or if their skill set might be better suited in another role. Further, many organizations invest in tuition reimbursement that may reskill an employee to another career path within the same company.

While upskilling or reskilling current employees is not likely to address all of your organizational hiring needs, it will help future-proof your organization. Providing training and leadership development to an employee can develop their professional skills and position them as valuable members of your organization. Businesses that understand the benefits of leadership development with both upskilling and reskilling will help their team members find success in whichever position and responsibility they undertake and whatever challenges your company tackles.

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