Upskilling and Reskilling: Key Priorities in the Evolving Workplace (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Coming to trend 4, I think a lot of us saw a lot of flux in our own organizations and across industries we saw trends like massive downsizing, restructuring, because suddenly organizations had to rethink the way they did work and survive in this new normal. And upskilling and reskilling the workforce really became a top priority, simply for the reason that they were rapidly evolving processes, technologies, and there was an urgent and compelling need to close the skill gaps and also to fill positions internally. And especially probably because it was the nature of remote work that organizations felt increasingly comfortable with getting on board somebody for a role from within rather than looking out externally. And along with that, all of this came the challenge of equipping every single employee to not just function reasonably well in this new work environment, but also thrive in this changing environment. So again, an interesting statistics, 51% of L&D pros who were polled globally say that internal mobility is more of a priority now than it ever was before COVID-19. So those are very interesting things that we see happening across organizations regardless of the domain that organization is in. And as far as the current state of training priorities go, 56% of L&D pros in large enterprises said that upskilling and reskilling was their top focus. And this was taken from a 2021 report, which was published towards the end of the year. But I think we can confidently extrapolate and say that this year is going to be no different. And 62% of L&D pros in medium-sized businesses said that upskilling and reskilling was a priority. So organizations, especially training organizations, were increasingly tasked with providing very clear career progression for their employees, making sure that their employees were future-proofed and thereby their own organizations were future-proofed. And of course, reskilling in the case of lateral moves and cross-functional roles and so on.