Hiring New Skills More Effectively Upskill or Reskill

When I started my practice I put all my efforts into differentiation from day one and at every level. When you have a differentiation mindset you’re driven by culture and not by finance. Even though sometimes you know that your financial interests dictate specific actions to be done, you simply ignore them because your culture and your values do not simply allow this. This culture-driven mindset of the founder goes down to the deepest roots of the practice and quite reflects its values in hiring processes. If your strategy is based on differentiation you can never hire employees from the system or the marketplace which you are differentiating yourself from. So you forego the thought of hiring based on seniority, experience, and expertise. Moreover, you avoid wasting your time recruiting and interviewing from the existing pool, but rather you will prefer a skill-based approach to hiring new employees.

As a result of the pandemic, new research revealed that the top of mind priorities in rank order among managers are upskilling and reskilling (59%), leadership and management (53%), and virtual onboarding (33%). Two-thirds of the study respondents agreed that learning new skills makes them more adaptable. Among the most noted skills, resilience landed the number one slot, and digital fluency came in second. Very few employees and employers realize that the skills they have for one job can be easily transferred to another. In an event like the pandemic or if you are simply starting a new practice, you have to hire based on skillset and not work history. Moreover, instead of hiring based on finance hire based on your company’s culture and instill learning new skills spirit into your existing employees. Besides shifting to a skill-based approach when hiring, companies should support new career paths for their employees and give employees learning time and rewards.

The pandemic has left us with a lot of lessons all related to the fact that no one can predict what the future will bring. If we focus on developing the right emerging skills, we will be ready to respond easily to future challenges with a resilient workforce that can move freely and adapt to different projects, teams, and work. Forward-thinking companies are emphasizing employee learning as they continuously uncover and cultivate emerging skills. Many argue that a significant part of today’s workforce does not have the prerequisite skills to perform a job. The only differentiator that takes an employee’s career path to the next level is skill development offered by employers.