With the global economy experiencing massive change, Reskilling and Upskilling have taken on a renewed sense of urgency. 

Success through these evaluations requires a major shift in thinking about how recruiting and worker development are done.

The economic toll of the pandemic is expected to leave more than 140 million people out of work and another 1.6 billion at danger of income loss.

Unfortunately, many of the jobs lost simply won’t return. 

At the same time, certain industries and companies like manufacturing and logistics can’t recruit fast enough. Shifting to a skills-focused approach is a possible solution to an emerging workforce dilemma.

Employees often don’t realize that the skills they have for one job can be simply transferred to another – nor do workers. 

Take food servers who lost their jobs due to Covid-19. More than 70% of them have the skills required to succeed in customer service, which is currently one of the most in-demand jobs on LinkedIn. 

Had servers and people recruiting for customer service experts known they already had many of the required skills, we may have seen an important shift of out-of-work food servers into in-demand roles instead of looking for those positions to go unfilled.

Evaluating workers and new recruits based on their skill set instead of their work history can help level the playing field – and help organizations realize the talent they already have. 

It also makes talent pools more divergent and often makes recruiting more effective. 

This is the future of recruiting and development. 

To get ahead of it, organizations need to start introducing learning into their organization cultures. 

Companies slow on the uptake will be left behind and forced to deal with unmotivated and unsatisfied workers and importantly less innovation overall. 

At a time when talent is the number-one commodity in business, organizations can’t afford to remain stuck in old mindsets.

Here are three ways organizations can re skill and upskill their existing workforce and take a skills-based approach to recruiting new workers.

Support new career paths for your workers

Many large organizations around the world  have viewed the need to upskill their current talent as critical for the last few years and have spent millions – and in some cases, billions – in “future-proofing” their workers, loading them with the skills required to adapt to changing work. 

If your organization is unable to support a structured learning program, motivate managers to find out what other areas of the organization their workers are focused in learning about and help them engage in cross-functional projects and meetings. 

You shouldn’t have to switch organizations to get ahead – supporting and creating these learning programs not only shows your workers that you’re invested in their future, but also open various pathways for growth privately and can emerge into new career paths. 

Don’t wait for the next dilemma to begin the process of reskilling workers for critical roles. 

Developing internal programs that address and identify skill gaps not only helps train for future disturbance but also helps your most dedicated and strongest workers feel secure.

Give workers rewards and learning time

Managers and executives should make it clear that ongoing education is essential to personal career growth and can be done on organization time. 

To help promote a learning culture, motivate workers to block out calendar time for learning each month or week – and do the same. 

If managers have customized learning time, workers will be more likely to follow suit.

Some businesses foster their learning programs with incentives and contests. Rewards, whether internal kudos or monetary, can boost worker participation considerably. 

Manager and executive participation is a must – it’s important for us to  lead by example. 

Shift to a skills-based approach when recruiting

We can see organizations are starting to be more willful about recruiting for a candidate’s future potential, not their past history. 

But it’ll be a long road. Our traditional hiring process still places an attention on certain types of experience, education, or personal referrals that can lead to a corresponding workforce.

By taking a skills-based  approach to the recruiting process, titles and diplomas can sit alongside certifications, endorsements, assessments, and other backup methods for determining the ability and fit of a candidate. 

What’s more, by concentrating on skills, workers can increase the size of their talent pools, permitting them to pinpoint quality candidates for hard-to-fill roles. 

Once you’ve recruited them, keep your workers committed and your organization ready to adapt to altering demands by developing a culture of learning. 

It’s how we’ll start recruiting and developing talent  for the future, not the past.