What we have been calling a new normal, the one that the crisis caused by Covid-19 has brought us, will create substantial changes in terms of management within the company. In fact, a few days ago we were talking about the changes it has brought at the level of corporate culture. But there are many more… One of the most important assets of any company is its human capital. On many occasions, professionals have skills that may be hidden or wasted, something that is now essential to overcome the moments that lie ahead and in which the concept of reskilling takes on a capital importance.
What is reskilling?
Reskilling is a way of recycling the worker’s talent. The term is borrowed from the Anglo-Saxon field and is used to refer normally to something that is already known within any company. This is nothing more than professional recycling, although with certain nuances in this case.
Normally, this recycling to which we refer has been imposed as a necessity for the individual worker who decided to improve their employment situation or who was unemployed for any reason.
In these cases, job search experts recommend that the professional carry out a recycling process to adapt to new work roles, but that is not what the concept we are referring to here is about.
The recycling to which this term refers is rather a strategy of the company itself. In many cases, human resources departments overlook the talents of their own employees and go straight into the hiring of new staff.
Obviously, hiring is inevitable at many times, but not at all. Reskilling is a strategy that is based on continuously recycling employees themselves, making them aware of their own abilities in different job roles.
What's more, mobility within the organization chart of the company is essential to be able to carry it out correctly. Any employee who enters a company that is committed to this strategy will have to be prepared to occupy different positions in different areas throughout their professional career.
In this way, more than individual recycling, it is a way of re-educating the worker, turning him into a much more asset capable of facing disparate challenges within the same corporate organization chart.
Advantages of reskilling
It is not difficult to see that the company can benefit enormously from professionals capable of assuming various positions with equal effectiveness, and it is necessary to put aside that the idea of ultra-specialization of human capital is the only way for a company to progress.
On the contrary, professional flexibility will bring many benefits to the company that bets on it. We are talking about, for example, the possibility of having shorter workforces due to the enormous mobility within the organization that the same worker can have.
This can have positions that need reinforcement filled at any time with the company's own resources without having to go to the recruitment market to satisfy a specific need.
As we pointed out, hiring is necessary, but there are very specific situations limited in time in which hiring for short periods of time only adds an element to a team that will not end up identifying with it due to lack of time.
This adaptation problem does not occur in the case of retraining of a professional who already knows the company's work culture. Along with this, it is impossible not to notice that shorter workforces most of the time involve lower salaries, something that can bring both benefits for the employer and for the workers.
On the other hand, investing as many resources as the company's efforts in the re-education of the workers and in bringing out their true skills is something that will reinforce the worker's identification with the company.
The latter is something important. It is more than proven that the employees who realize that their functions are promoted and even who discover new capacities thanks to internal recycling are more motivated professionals with a greater identification with the company's objective.
What role will it play in the new normal?
If at the beginning of this writing we referred to the new normal that Covid-19 has created in the business world, it was not by chance. Many companies have had to reduce their workforce as much as possible due to the financial difficulties associated with this new crisis.
According to the report 'Decoding Global Talent', by Boston Consulting Group and the international headhunting firm The Network, up to 61% of companies have assumed that this internal labor recycling process will be essential to weather the storm of difficulties that the situation brings with it.
The figure is not at all negligible, since it serves to express very clearly that there are many large companies that have begun to see in this strategy a salvation for the future.
The heads of Spanish companies consulted in the study that we have cited point out that the new characteristics of the business world will demand the existence and training of versatile and dynamic workers who can face continuous recycling processes to adapt to the specific needs that they always have.
And, of course, these workers don't just come out of nowhere. It is the company and the work culture that must produce them. Covid-19 has come to create an extremely changing world that does not stop changing its needs at high speeds.
In this way, the rigidity with which jobs within the company, managers and executives have always been understood, must be parked, something that will only be achieved with that re-education that we have been talking about so far.
New trends in talent management
Of course, everything that we have said so far must be supported by a management by the human resources of a company that allows adequate re-education.
In this sense, the most innovative trends indicate that the company must create an internal training plan that affects all the company's professionals and brings them closer to those areas that are furthest from their professional situation.
This training plan should be based on a previous strategy: recognize the needs, strengths and weaknesses of a specific workforce. This is where human resources departments come into play, and it is that they are the cornerstone on which the internal recycling of professionals will be based.
Finally, an environment must be created in which the worker can easily opt for training that recycles it and makes it more versatile in the company. That is, it must be stimulated in any way and not pretend that the process is carried out through obligation, something that will not be seen by the professional as a mere addition to the workload that it already supports.
In short, re-educating and recycling the worker by increasing their capacities and versatility within the company is presented as something fundamental within the new normal that must be faced in the business world after Covid-19.
