Even if a worker defies the odds and stays with the same company for their entire career, there is no such thing as a lifelong job anymore.
Technology changes too fast — and so do positions and expectations. Entire sectors come and go at a pace that would have been inconceivable mere decades ago, as markets whip employers and employees about with abandon.
It’s why companies, workers, and even governments are starting to think more and more about the critical role of upskilling and reskilling.
While it would be easy to dismiss these terms as simply the latest buzzwords in a world of digital transformation and workplace upheaval, the stakes can be higher and more significant than either a better bottom line or a higher paycheque. That’s particularly true as technology continues to change and AI rises to challenge almost every aspect of work.
The right upskilling can help older workers remain critical to the companies they already know and understand, help younger workers chase their career dreams, improve retention and fill worker shortage. But upskilling, and reskilling in particular, can also be a powerful tool for diversity and inclusion or to smooth over economic shifts.
It all boils down to managing risks and finding payoffs, both big and small.
“One of the things that we understand in all of our work is that when it comes to hiring for companies, particularly for SMEs — which a lot of our tech companies are — it’s as much about managing risk and the perception of risk as it is about acquiring talent and skills,” says AJ Tibando, the chief strategy officer at Palette Skills, a Canadian not-for-profit focused on upskilling.
Understanding perception of risk and how that plays out in workplaces can be a powerful tool, ushering in untapped potential and retaining workers already well versed in a particular company.
Why do workers and employers want to upgrade?
Tibando says there’s not one kind of worker who seeks additional training or help transitioning to a new career.
“No one is going to be…untouched by this next wave of technological change, whether it’s in your job or in your life,” she says. “It’s kind of coming for all of us in different ways.”
Her organization focuses on people with “potential or untapped potential,” who might have the right sort of underlying skills, but who might lack proper training or experience. They then try to overcome that risk aversion in employers who might usually balk at the candidate.
Abu Batasi, who oversees corporate training in his role as director of sales for Lighthouse Labs, says there is no one reason why individuals and businesses seek out his company for bootcamps — ranging from cybersecurity to data analytics.
The company not only provides training, but also connections to employers for job seekers at the end of their course — a key “value proposition,” says Batasi.
Workers gain new skills and, hopefully, a new job.
A recent report from upskiller PluralSight suggests there’s no shortage of demand for those kinds of services.
In the State of Upskilling 2023, 52% of respondents who work in tech say it’s important to learn new skills in times of economic uncertainty, but that same study also indicated 42% of respondents said they were too busy to upskill.
That poses a challenge for companies that don’t focus on continuous upskilling for employees, and can lead to big costs when retention plummets.
“I think it’s about six times more expensive to hire externally, when you consider the premium that you have to pay, and the recruitment fees and all that stuff, versus if you were strategic about just skilling the right people in your company that are already showing a lot of promise,” says Batasi.
The PluralSight report suggests that benefit is well understood by companies, with 97% of HR and learning and development respondents saying they prioritize internal talent over outside hiring for open positions.
That sort of value crosses generational lines, with workers both young and older seeking new skills. Batasi says it’s often younger workers looking for upskilling while older workers tend to seek reskilling, but, he added, that dichotomy is only a broad generalization.
Bringing in new faces and experiences
While consistency can be a powerful advantage for a company, it can also act as a barrier.
In order to attract new workers and expand the pool of talent across Canada, there have to be targeted interventions tailored to the right circumstances according to Rob Davidson, the director of data science at the Information and Communications Technology Council, a not-for-profit focused on Canada’s place in a digital economy.
“I’ll use cybersecurity as an example,” he says. “They all want to have cybersecurity people with experience, which does not provide any entry points for new talents. So everybody is just recycling the same people, and the gaps are never filled, which is not a good thing if you consider cybersecurity a strategic and national imperative for Canada.”
Read more: Why is there such a massive cybersecurity talent gap in Canada?
The benefits of new faces, however, goes beyond new recruits into an exclusive industry. It also allows for a breadth of experiences and backgrounds. But overcoming those barriers, conscious or otherwise, can be a challenge.
Tibando says risk perception gets down to the granular level when companies are on the hunt for new hires. Palette Skill’s data shows there are challenges across almost all demographic categories.
“Despite the fact that everybody goes through the same process, once they hit the job market and human behaviour and risk analysis starts to kick in, older workers take longer to get placed, Black workers — particularly Black women — take longer to get placed.”
Women in general don’t face the same challenges, she says, but Black women endure more interviews and wait the longest between interviews and job offers — even though they are offered initial interviews faster than any other demographic.
Read more: Women are great cybersecurity hires. So why are they so underrepresented in a short-staffed field?
Tibando says companies are always lamenting a worker shortage, but need to overcome overt and unconscious biases in order to help alleviate the problem.
Getting it right
Those kinds of barriers don’t exist in isolation, and tectonic shifts in workplaces and whole sectors can have a profound effect.
Sure, many are simply interested in acquiring a new skill and moving up in their careers, but for others it can involve surmounting social barriers or facing a new reality where people feel like their industry and their world is moving on.
Reskilling those workers carries political and social challenges, particularly when areas are dominated by one industry that can become ingrained in their identity, and where changes can have far reaching economic shocks.
But it can’t be solved by expecting everyone to be a tech worker.
Take blue collar workers. As Davidson explains, “in Virginia, for coal miners, they tried to take them from being displaced coal miners to becoming programmers, there wasn’t a fit.”
He says programs need to take into account the industries at question, the workers involved, and considerations of place. His organization helped build a program that reskills oil and gas workers in Calgary as that industry contracts, amid uncertainty and efficiencies.
“There’s some real big workforce development challenges that are out there,” he says.
“And you’ve got to be very careful about trying anybody that says that they can solve it immediately. There’s probably misleading people. Let’s put it that way.”
