As automation and AI increasingly take hold in the corporate world, many companies are increasing their investments in skill-building of all kinds: upskilling, reskilling, and even “outskilling” – where employers train employees who are being laid off to help them get their next job. Some of these investments help workers adopt new tools to speed up parts of their jobs. Others aim to fill open jobs within the company, addressing the paradox wherein automation and AI cause jobs to disappear from one part of the company but also cause a shortage of skilled labor elsewhere.
Make Sure Your Company’s Reskilling Efforts Pay Off
A recent report from the World Economic Forum and PwC found that investment in closing the skills gap could boost GDP by $6.5 trillion by 2030. That’s a lot of money at stake, and yet most companies measure the impact of their investments in reskilling programs using soft metrics like completion rates, satisfaction score, or employee feedback. The author suggests four sets of measures that, taken together, could form a comprehensive scorecard for your company: 1) Cost metrics, or comparing the costs of reskilling with the costs of not doing so; 2) Productivity metrics, or quantifying the speed or effectiveness with which the skills are deployed; 3) People metrics that measure the stability and satisfaction of your workforce; and 4) Sponsor satisfaction metrics, or asking whether managers see a difference in their team’s work after the reskilling effort.