Crucial

Employee
Skills
How to unlock and develop
them in the workplace
Why do skills matter?
Skills gaps are emerging at an even faster rate than ever before.
Roles are evolving. New fields are emerging.
Empowering internal mobility comes down to helping
employees develop new and crucial skills.
Which skills matter?
The skills that are important to develop are those that make up
the crucial job roles in your organisation – existing or
anticipated.
Knowing what skills you need to develop is about knowing what
skills are in demand amongst your workforce – because this
creates desirable learning opportunities.
Hard vs Soft
Skills
What are hard skills?
• Teachable, quantifiable and measurable.
• Often considered learned abilities, aka those that are
repeatedly honed through practice and education.
• Most are role specific, though there are increasingly more that
are transferrable.
• Examples: Coding, video editing, bookkeeping, SEO marketing.
What are soft skills?
• Commonly known as people skills.
• Can be considered the way you perform a hard skill.
• Training for soft skills can help you more easily develop hard
skills.
• A growth mindset means people are more open to
improvement.
• Examples: teamwork, leadership, emotional intelligence,
adaptability.
Benefits of
Skill
Training
 Attract high performers
(And retain them). High performers are a valuable
commodity in the labour market.
The Great Resignation gave employees the power. They want
to feel valued and that they are constantly learning and
developing their skillset.
 Match the pace of change
50% of all employees will need to be reskilled by
2025. While things like automation are driving many
skills to expiration, they also lead to the creation of
new ones.
 Widen your candidate pool
Workforce development should consider both the role and
the potential of an individual to adapt, reskill and take on new
responsibilities.
Give employees room to develop the skills and proficiency
needed to navigate sudden and ongoing change.
 Less micromanaging
Developing managerial skills means you can create the
succession pipeline of your dreams. And developing
employee capabilities means managers can do more
strategising and less course correction.
Better, more agile performance
Many employees may not go beyond their role description
because they don’t know how. Reskilling helps employees
practice capabilities that underpin internal mobility.
Agile employees can respond to change with less stress and
the same confidence and efficiency as usual.
 Skill
Building
Strategies
 Personalised Pathways
Using technology like a learning management system (LMS)
allows you to build pathways that map out the exact learning
journey an individual personally needs to take.
Learning in the flow of work
This gives employees access to short burst content
through which they can learn something, apply it, and
then go back to work.
 Mentoring
Mentoring utilises internal experts, provides clear channels
for mission-critical knowledge and provides real-world
context for formal L&D programs.
 Cross-Team Collaboration
Encouraging teams to work together more often brings
together complementary skillsets and enhances what’s
learned in an online class. This gives employees the ability to
experientially develop a new skill.
 You can learn more about this
topic by checking out the full
article:

https://acornlms.com/enterprise-learning-
management/skill