Upskilling your workforce in a post-covid world July 8, 2021

Upskilling your workforce in a post-covid world

The global pandemic has highlighted a growing need to invest in the upskilling of employees.

Where we work, how we work and, how we recruit and engage employees has changed rapidly over the past year or so.

Digitalisation had already started to gain pace but restrictions accelerated this path, meaning companies had to quickly update their business model and redirect their workforce.

From an employee perspective, the redirection has seen many step up and ‘learn on the job’ as their roles evolve and expand, whilst others have floundered due to learning needs.

Many lessons have been learned during this time about the importance of upskilling workforces and, as we move towards a world with less or no restrictions, many could be excused for thinking the skills struggle is over.

However, for businesses to successfully rebuild and refocus post-pandemic we believe employee training and development should be a key point on the corporate agenda this year, and beyond.

Upskill your workforce with LTFE

From training managers on how to lead a new generation or remote workers to maintain productivity and engagement, to reskilling employees and adapting their roles post-covid, LTFE provides more than 300 training courses to invest in your team's development.

At LTFE, our ethos is to improve performance through highly relevant, innovative programmes that enable you to focus on ‘real-life’ education that inspire and impact far more profoundly than traditional classroom models.

If your return to the office schedule hasn’t kicked in yet, we also offer a range of covid-safe online courses, ensuring delivery of your upskilling programme isn’t delayed.

To help you build an effective training and development strategy to enable you to upskill your workforce in a post-covid world, here are our suggested priorities to consider.

Identifying key skills your business relies on

Knowing what key skills your business relies on is vital for ensuring you develop a training and development strategy focusing on your current work-based competencies, and allows you to build adaptability and resilience going forward.

For example, if your sales have moved from largely being face to face to being online or telephone-based, ensuring your workforce has the skills to not just confidently deliver their own role, but enable them to cross-sell products or services too is vital.

It’s not just your sales staff you should think about training either. Building team resilience means training members of your administration or marketing teams to offer basic support – helping to close sales and promote great customer service too.

If you’re not 100% sure on what your company’s key skills should be, don’t fret. Our team can work with you to identify your business training needs and highlight the relevant courses available or what in-house or bespoke options would work best.

Learn more about our learning solutions.

Meeting digital and soft skills in demand

With more and more aspects of businesses moving online, providing your workforce with even just the basic digital skills will help to empower your employees to access information, offer resilience and allow for adaptability going forward.

In addition, investing in soft skills training, such as developing collaboration, communication, problem solving and leadership, can help motivate and support employees now and through any internal changes in the future, whilst building trust in your management team.

In particular, this may help managers and team leaders to inspire their team whilst they work remotely ensuring productivity remains high and creativity isn’t stifled.

To help, we are currently offering a 10% discount on our Team Management and Leadership course, and 15% off our Risk and Crisis Management course.

View these courses as well as our other training offers.

Fostering a culture of learning

Having proactive employees who are keen to learn is vital for any upskilling programme, however, the onus of your training and development strategy should on your company to successfully anticipate the skills required and foster a culture of learning.

Introducing learning aspects into team meetings and encouraging additional reading via newsletters, blogs and videos can assist with this - as can investing in your current and future leadership team’s performance.

LTFE’s Executive Coaching sees our knowledgeable coaches work with your best talent to unlock their potential by increasing self-awareness of strengths and identify solutions to challenges.

Tailored to an individual’s own needs, the coaching sessions will help to increase motivation, sharpen focus and increase performance.

Read more about the coaching at Learning Solutions

Protect training and development budgets

Creating a training and development strategy for upskilling your workforce is all well and good, but delivery is reliant on budget.

Since it has been a difficult year, it is easy to see budgets directed at ‘returning to normal’ activities and upskilling forgotten.

To protect your training and development budget, remember to track gains related to any previous upskilling during the pandemic. This could be anything from the number of employees accessing online support resources, to sales and customer service.

Utilising these results can demonstrate the impact of the learning which in turn can help you to build a business case for maintaining or developing your training and development budget in the future.

For more information about how LTFE can help you to upskill your workforce in a post-pandemic world, read our FAQs