Top 5 Challenges to Personalized Upskilling and Reskilling at Scale

Upskilling and reskilling are at the heart of learning and development initiatives for organizations. As technological advancements continue to recreate the role of workers across industries, organizations must find ways to ensure their teams are adequately trained for the future.

While the need has never been greater—according to the World Economic Forum Job Report, 50% of the employees will need reskilling by 2025—many organizations are unaware of how to take productive steps toward reskilling and upskilling or are still operating on presumptions that inhibit taking action.

Let’s examine the top five perceived challenges organizations see when introducing technology into their learning and development processes.

1. Lack of management/top-down training and support

Often, organizations claim they have managers or other leaders who lack coaching skills, proper learning and development training, or are uncomfortable with exploring new, more agile development processes.

However, as Harvard Business Review points out, day-to-day coaching is available to leadership just like top-down training is available to less senior team members. Additionally, with the introduction of technology, repeatable, observable, and trackable results can allow an organization to see just how much progress management is making in their own coaching development, as well as the impact those newly implemented skill sets are having on subordinates.

2. Need for intuitive, scalable infrastructures

Another perceived barrier to leveraging advancements in learning and development is the belief that an organization lacks the technological ecosystem to develop and deliver personalized learning and that implementing such a platform would be too difficult to administer and maintain.

However, with technological advancements in virtual classroom platforms, the reality is that on-premise overhauls are no longer necessary. With SaaS-based technologies, organizations can leverage the full power of a virtual training platform solution just as easily as they launch a video web conferencing tool on their browser.

3. Scalability is cost-prohibitive

In the past, training a growing number of team members meant paying more money for each new iteration of the training. With virtual training platforms, though, scalability doesn’t have to impact an organization’s bottom line directly. In fact, the scalability of virtual training offerings is one of the most significant advantages of the digital approach. Not only does an organization not have to hire or pay trainers for each new session, but because the training is digitized, consistency and uniformity can be introduced, as well. Now, your best sales associate can train every new team member from one recording—making the most of your highly valuable employee’s time while also ensuring all new team members get the best insights.

4. The organization lacks a culture of learning

It’s one thing to task an organization with changing up their dated, highly manual training process for a new, scalable, more impactful virtual training platform—it can be altogether scarier for an organization that has no culture of learning at all, to step into a virtual training approach.

However, this is a perfect scenario for adopting virtual training. Moving from a one-size-fits-all approach to a collaborative, ongoing upskilling and reskilling strategy can help empower team members to identify what areas lead to success for an organization and elements that are detrimental. Not only is this helpful in determining the skillsets and strategies to pass along to new team members, but it can also help uncover areas of inefficiency plaguing the organization outside the scope of learning and development.

5. Personalization, especially at scale, is too difficult

There are two issues an organization could be identifying with this perceived challenge. The first is that understanding each team member’s specific needs—and then offering virtual training to address those needs—feels daunting. The other is the concern that, if those needs are identifiable, the ability to tailor programming to each individual’s unique needs will require too much management and upkeep.

The great news for both of these perceived hurdles is that they are easy to overcome. First, identifying the unique training needs of your team members will not only help inform improved training facilitation, but it will also help your organization properly document the skills necessary for success in each role, which is helpful for budget distribution, future hiring, and many other factors outside of training.

Second, tailoring virtual training sessions specific to different teams, departments, or even roles, is one of the key benefits of leveraging a virtual training platform. As Tanya Dsouza notes in her article for Training Industry, “Technology can be a key facilitator in implementing personalized upskilling and reskilling programs at scale.”

A truly personalized, scalable upskilling and reskilling solution

Virtual training platforms not only address each of the five perceived challenges explored above, they also provide a host of other benefits—many of which are unavailable in traditional training approaches. Real-time data insights, including user engagement rates, can give an organization next-level awareness of the impact of personalized training. Additionally, comparing those data trends against other KPI metrics can let an organization tap into accurate ROI data points to measure the value of training, as well as the efficacy of various training modules.

Ready to see what your organization could do with that level of insight? Talk with a Class team member today, and take your organization’s upskilling and reskilling to new heights.