Upskilling neglected by many employers

While a vast majority of organizations (74 per cent) believe that upskilling is important, only 17 per cent are confident they know what future skills will be needed for their own success, according to a Deloitte report.

Both employers and employees appreciate the importance of upskilling, but there is a disconnect, finds Building the Future-Ready Workforce.

“When we surveyed workers, 90 per cent of them said they believe they’re going to need to refresh their skills every year; 74 per cent of the business leaders believe that skills gaps are going to be a big issue for them,” says Kathy Woods, national workforce transformation leader at Deloitte in Toronto.

But only 16 per cent of organizations expect to make significant investment in learning over the next three years.

This upcoming skills gap is expected to cost organizations dearly, according to Woods, who cites World Economic Forum research that pegs the impact at $3 trillion by 2030.

“It’s clear that the capabilities we need are different, and if we don’t figure out what those new skills are [and] help people build those capabilities, we’re going to be really behind the eight-ball,” says Woods. “There’s a huge opportunity for Canadian companies to take this unfortunate situation of the pandemic and use it to their benefit to become more competitive and just make Canada more innovative.”

During the pandemic, many businesses have transformed, which shows that adopting a different mindset is possible, despite the challenges, she says.

“I spoke to a bank that suddenly realized that in their huge organization, where collaboration was always an issue and functional silos were a problem... the pandemic forced them to immediately collaborate better,” says Woods.

“One of the shifts that happened is people are now trying to figure out: How do we maintain these ways of working, and how can we keep doing that differently in order to maintain some of these benefits that we’ve seen as a result?”

EllisDon sees need to transform

Many in the business world have been aware of the existence of this gap for years, says one HR executive.

“[It’s] about making sure we’re using analytics to decide how we’re following through as much as we can on not only what the employees need, but ‘Do we know where we’re going in the future?’ because employees drive what we do for the future,” says Paul Trudel, senior vice-president of people and culture at EllisDon in Toronto.

The construction company has always believed that “upskilling is really the evidence of the agility of our employees, and then how they help drive our business,” says Trudel, citing an anecdote that CEO Geoff Smith likes to use about a flooring firm that remained successful by transitioning from cannonball manufacturing to floor heating over its 200 years of existence.

“That’s been influential over what EllisDon does,” says Trudel. “How are you as a business going to evolve over 200 years? And that’s what upskilling is.”

To keep up, employers need to invest more into educating their current workforce, says Trudel, by providing them multiple ways to upskill that would benefit the company in the long run.

But in incentivizing employees to change, the employer can’t be stuck in its ways, he says.

“Are they incentivizing people for what tomorrow could look like? Are we really looking at that skill set and whether it’s investing in their education or investing through bonuses or pay increases? Are you really talking about what the future looks like, or are you talking about what the last 12 months have looked like?”

Learning key to transformation

It’s important to look to future skills needs and not focus too much on what is needed today, such as more technical skills, says Woods.

“What are those skills that are going to endure? And how do I unearth them in people? How do I reinforce them? And how do I select for them?” she says.

“Things like curiosity — always wanting to experiment and try new things — and being willing to fail and pick up and learn from it. There’s a resilience factor, there’s a collaboration factor, so really looking at those skills is an important place to start as well.”

And integrating real-time learning into the daily flow of work upends the traditional model of sending a worker to school for a full-time course, says Woods.

“For example, we’re seeing a lot of mining companies, oil and gas companies, manufacturing companies, where they’ve got people going out to a site and looking at equipment and needing to fix or needing to test it, having iPads. And in the moment, the iPad can show you ‘Here’s how to do the safety check,’ ‘Here’s how to do this test.’ Right there in the moment, you’ve got that tool there to help you learn right when you need it.”

“Instead of saying, ‘We’re going to send you to a training program and you’re going to be gone for two weeks, and then come back and you’re going to be all upskilled,’ [it’s about] ‘How do we actually give you tools and training in the moment on the job when you’re working?’” she says.

As an example, two years ago, the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board in Ontario decided that it needed need to upskill its workforce, so 200 employees went through continuing education to study disability management at Pacific Coast University for Workplace Health Sciences (PCU-WHS) in Victoria, says Wolfgang Zimmermann, president of the school.

Similarly, the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) had to contend with new legislation, passed in August 2020, that shifted it from a tort system to no-fault, which completely transformed the business of the provincially mandated property and casualty insurer. So, 200 workers took courses to prepare, and the corporation was “able to respond to the changes that are required in order for their staff to cope with changing legislation,” says Zimmermann.

Anyone who resists this new model of learning is clinging to a mostly reactive mindset, he says.

“If they don’t have a proactive mindset — especially larger and state organizations — a mindset of innovation and thought leadership and a best-practice agenda, and align their views and their corporate policies and practices along that, then they won’t react until it’s too late — and BlackBerry is a perfect example.”

The formerly market-leading company “missed the corner in the road and went off the cliff after Apple introduced the iPhone, and it never recovered from that,” he says. “Whether it’s a health issue or whether it’s a technology issue, or whether it’s some other type of change, to continuously stay on the cutting edge of knowledge is absolutely critical.”