Growing the Skill Sets of Your Organization's Workforce

Investing in your workforce by providing internal training, paying for external training and certifications, and sending your employees to conferences, is investing in your bottom line. Investing in the professional growth of your employees has many benefits that more than justify any associated costs.

Giving employees the ability to develop and build upon current skill sets is a great way to improve employee morale. Investing in your employees’ growth shows that you care about them and their career paths. It makes them feel competent and empowered in their work, both in the day-to-day, and long term. And it’s not just that they feel more empowered, they are!

This can also reduce your turnover rate. Over time, employees begin to look for more out of their current position… more money, more challenges, more responsibility, etc. Providing your employees with new skills, and showing them that you’re invested in their growth, can contribute to reduced turnover within your organization.

Not only does this boost morale as mentioned above, but you can train internal employees for growth within your organization. You don’t always have to find an external candidate, with a certain skill set, when you can reward a loyal and knowledgeable employee with a promotion that will help your organization and ensure less turnover.

Reducing turnover should be a top priority for every organization. Why? Because it can not only be financially expensive, but it can have many other negative impacts on your organization like:

·         Lowered productivity

·         Overworked and resentful employees left to carry the weight

·         Lost knowledge that the specific employee had and will take with them

·         Additional training costs

·         Costs and time involved with recruitment and interviewing  

Don’t let preventable turnover affect your organization because you didn’t invest in the future and growth of your best employees. Give them a chance to learn and grow within your organization, and you’ll be surprised at how loyal they will become.  

Similarly, investing in your employees’ development can help you find out who your best employees are. They’ll be the ones that take their education seriously, that strive to motivate others, and that question the status quo when it’s not helping the organization improve. These are the sort of people who are confident in their work and know their value. They’re more interested in how a position can help their career grow than how much it pays; they place more value in the future than the present.

It’s important to identify these top performers because they are the ones you want to continue to invest in. As mentioned in the last point, development and growth opportunities should be awarded to those that deserve them, and this can help you find the best candidates right within your organization, instead of having to look elsewhere.

We all bring different skills to the table in the workplace, and that’s a really good thing. But your employees’ skill sets are only of use to you if you know how to identify their skills in the first place.

If you want to learn more about the skill sets your workforce possesses, you can hire a talent development organization to complete a skills assessment or ability assessment. They can build a framework, that can be integrated into your current Talent Management System and provide you real-time analysis of your workforce’s skills.

As we continue to slowly emerge from the current worldwide pandemic, employees who, until now, have been focused on keeping their job, start to think about what’s available in a newly booming job market. This will almost certainly lead the most driven and ambitious of your employees; the ones you least want to lose, to search for new jobs, outside of your organization. Lack of opportunity to develop one’s career is known to be a key driver of voluntary departure.

The loss of top talent can result in a loss of valuable customer relationships. It can harm morale, leading to reduced productivity and, often, the departure of other talents. Then, add into this the costs of recruiting and training new employees which essentially increase operating costs and cut into profits.