What is Upskilling and its importance in your career ahead?

Keeping up with industry changes and understanding new concepts such as upskilling is difficult in the modern workforce. Now the question arises, “What is upskilling?” becomes increasingly important as technology and job requirements evolve. This energetic approach is important for both individuals seeking to advance their careers and employers seeking to balance a versatile and knowledgeable workforce. By getting upskilling, professionals can ensure they are prepared for their careers ahead, adapting to new challenges and opportunities as they arise.

Meaning of upskilling

Upskilling is a continuous process of learning and development opportunities for employees to enhance existing skills and acquire new competencies. It minimizes skill gaps and maximizes employee efficiency at the workplace. As we move towards a technology-driven world, existing skills are becoming no longer in use. Employees need regular upskilling to stay competitive and enhance their proficiencies. 

Effective upskilling courses can help companies & employees:

• Build functional, digital, leadership, and soft skills
• Enhances overall workforce performance
• Unlock various opportunities for internal mobility
• Ensure company growth & employees well-being

Upskilling: Why is it important for you?

Upskilling allows your workers to catch up with the doings in the industry. It is fast turning out to be a crucial performance analysis metric in the contemporary workplace. Companies that do not use upskilling will trail their competition. This is why even the biggest brands make upskilling a priority in the organization. For example, Amazon has committed more than $700M to its Upskilling 2025, an internally focused training program dedicated to serving customers and driving workforce progression.

Additional automation and AI are being added to job and career tracks; they bring skill gaps that the organization must close as quickly as possible for it to be successful. Up-skilling programs, designed strategically, can fill these gaps. It unlocks talent development and internal mobility possibilities and supports career goals. Upskilling will develop functional, leadership, and digital skills that make current employees future-ready and thus ensure long-term business growth.

Benefits of Upskilling 

The employment landscape is unpredictable. The potential for a recession, quiet-quitting, high-profile layoffs, and economic stress threatens employers as much as it does employees. Even though you cannot completely avoid uncertainty, you can safeguard your business and employees by equipping your workforce with the right skills. Read below the benefits of spending your time and energy on upskilling employees:

1. Boosts the retention level of employees

70 % of employees will leave their present job if an alternative organization has been available that would invest in their development and training. Forbes - keep your talent

The modern workforce is ambitious and strives for continuous growth. Where companies believe that the development and career growth of employees must be valued, they usually tend to stay loyal and offer the best performance. So, there's an urgent need to offer employee upskilling programs and progression opportunities to drive long-term retention.

2. Encourage continuous learning

Only the companies that develop a learning culture are successful in both retaining the existing workforce and attracting the best talent. A strong upskill strategy allows you to build a learning culture that becomes competency-oriented, develops critical skills, innovates frequently, and prepares a workforce for the future.

3. Productivity Improvement

Upskilling can arm your workforce with skills that will eventually make their day-to-day tasks more optimal and efficient, with the opportunity to increase productivity. As per PWC, 93% of CEOs who are upskilling witness a boost in productivity. It makes them much more efficient, reduces errors, and frees up time to deliver value-driven outputs.

4. Develop employee careers

Upskilling empowers employees to unleash their inherent true potential and discover new avenues for development within the organization. Improvement of work skills enables employees to achieve managerial expectations by outperforming them.

Their high-class performance allows them to receive positive feedback that gives them an idea to further inflate their ego and make efforts to work hard. With the continuous skilling and feedback process, the employees grow with the company as it grows on the career ladder up high.

Upskilling and Reskilling: A difference between 

Although the terms upskilling and reskilling are used interchangeably, they signify two different concepts. Since the creation of the right kind of successful skill-driven learning culture would require an understanding of the difference between upskilling and reskilling, that in itself would be a strategic move.

Upskilling involves developing the understanding of your workers through capabilities that fall in a particular category under that position that they are categorized under. Reskilling involves equipping your workforce with new skills to shift lanes and get into another role in your organization. Upskilling focuses on a linear type of growth, but reskilling facilitates lateral growth.

Ways to upgrade your Upskills to enhance your career 

Learning is a process that starts from guided instruction for a student and continues until the very end of one's life. Upskilling plays the same role in one's life. It may start at the most basic level when a person decides to learn something new in his or her field of interest. Also, in the professional upskilling context, one can focus on individual and personal upskilling for improvement in the proficiency of handling one's job or one may take a company-provided skill and training program to grow more expertise in that area.

1) Personal Upskilling: Often, an individual may be self-motivated to upskill to get better at handling responsibilities at work. This motivation could be simply to learn and understand more in an area, to be able to handle existing job responsibilities better, or to explore better professional opportunities. With the vast options that nowadays exist for education and learning, which can be either online or offline, you can appropriately develop your skills in an area of interest.

2) Job-Oriented Upskilling: At times, free access given by the company to courses and programs may also support employee upskilling. It is then done with the aim that the knowledge base may be allowed to improve and be applied effectively in the job they are performing. 

3) Company-Supported Upskilling: This is the type of upskilling involved when a company adopts a newer system of functioning or introduces some new technology in their operations which requires the employees to enhance themselves to adopt the new system of functioning and working.

In this case, various seminars and sessions with industry experts, mass employee training sessions, and training periods allow the employees to take up and acquire the skills efficiently over time. This type of upskilling is becoming very common today as more corporate companies are shifting to new technologies, software, and equipment for smoother functioning and company operations.

Top Courses for Upskilling Yourself

Today, the landscape of professional work is changing day in and day out, and students and working professionals must continually upskill themselves to be abreast with the relevant changes within their fields. More importantly, with so many options and career domains available today, you should select the upskilling course that is the best suited to meet your academic and career needs.

Here, we have listed some of the best ways of skillful learning through diverse courses for you.  

Online Professional Certification Programs

Oil and Gas Management Certification Course

• Renewable Energy Management Certification Course
• Power Management Certification Course
• International Business Management Certification Course 
• Industrial Safety Certification Course Logistics and 
• Supply Chain Management Certification Course

Fully Accredited Online Degree (UG & PG) Courses In 2024

Online MBA Programs 

• Online MCA Programs 
• Online M.Sc Programs
• Online MA Programs 
• Online M.Com Programs M Tech for Working Professionals
• Online Executive MBA 
• Online B.Com Programs 
• Online BA Programs
• Online BCA Programs 
• Online BBA Programs B Tech for Working Professionals

Online Vidya provides you with breaking the task as it gives you all the options for the best online degrees available just through the valid and duly accredited universities, which UGC-DEB has approved for online education. And that's not all-we'll provide you with individualized career support and guidance, and compare all your online education options so that you pick the best one for yourself.

Marketing Management Trending Upskilling Courses

Advanced Certificate In Online Digital Marketing Course 

• Advanced Certificate In Social Media and Content Marketing 
• Advanced Certificate In Search Engine Marketing
• Online Diploma Course In Marketing Management 
• Online BBA In Marketing Course 
• Online BBA In Digital Marketing
• MBA online Marketing Management 
• MBA online Marketing and Finance 
• MBA online Digital Marketing and E-Commerce
• IT Management

Artificial Intelligence Trending Upskilling Courses

Online Diploma In AI and Machine Learning 

• Online BCA In Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning 
• Online MCA In Artificial Intelligence
• Online MBA In Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning 
• Online MBA In Business Intelligence and AI 
• Online MBA In Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
• Cybersecurity 

Besides this, it also lays the foundation for professional development. With various facilities available for an individual's service such as online learning, internet facilities, MOOC courses, etc., there are numerous options available to individuals today for effective growth and skill improvement. There are countless areas one can get into and, finally, find their area of interest. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the objective of upskilling?

A: Upskilling improves skills to help perform better and be more productive and competitive—which is crucial in today's ever-changing environment. It also helps in saving costs, creating a resilient workforce, and filling in skill gaps.

Q: What is the positivity of upskilling?

A: By upskilling, you're not only even helping yourself but also contributing to the overall innovation and progress of your company. New skills and perspectives can lead to innovative solutions, making your workplace more competitive and dynamic.

Q: Can I study an upskilling program if I’m a school student?

A: Of course you can do and even the main idea behind upskilling is to enable students to learn in a lifelong and beyond-institutionalized manner. So, if you are interested in a particular domain, you can enhance your knowledge and skills in that domain right from your school life.  

Q: Training and upskilling the same thing?

A: Training focuses on standardizing practices and ensuring to have a baseline competency and on the other hand upskilling is aimed at improving existing skills and preparing employees for more advanced or evolving roles within the organization.

Q: What are the hurdles to upskilling?

A: The hurdles to skill development within the organizations are: 

• Lack of time, 
• Lack of budget, 
• Lack of offerings in content, topic, or depth, 
• Upskilling is not a priority for leadership.