As we continue to navigate the changes in the workforce, we recognize that organizations are facing a need to upskill their employees to create opportunities to take on new roles and projects at work.
In our final online event The future-ready workforce series: Upskilling to prepare the future of work, we heard from industry experts and current co-op students about their experiences with upskilling.
Upskilling provides someone with more advanced skills through additional education and training. But what skills should your employees learn?
“Our Step Up program allows us to give [students] that first push to doing some virtual learning, adapting to a virtual workplace, developing their soft skills, [as well as] doing their daily work in their career,” says Kelsey Dries, Campus Experience Specialist at BDO Canada. “I think we’ve always focused on the development of our students, but … we want to make sure that students really get the most value out of that, whether they’re in the office or working virtual.”
As we continue to build our understanding of the key competencies that employees will require to thrive in a complex future of work, it’s important to acknowledge that the future of workplace learning and professional development is changing.
One way to upskill employees is by offering professional and personal development that contributes to their ongoing future employability. This ensures that workers can perceive their learning as valuable and help them remain relevant in an evolving world of work.
“[One] tip I would have is to have the co-op students work on a real project that has an impact for the company, and not only something that will be used for training,” says Shaili Kadakia, a Business Administration and Computer Science double degree student. “I think it's important for employers to explain the outcome and the impact of the work that the co-op is working on. Because for students like myself, it's very motivating to know what we're working on, why it's important and who it's going to help.”
As the future of work continues to evolve, your organization must think critically about how you train your teams. It can be difficult to identify the skills your employees may need to support your organization in the future and whether to develop those in-house, recruit them in the market or hire them temporarily as needed.
“I use co-op students to help upskill my full-time staff,” says Kunal Gupta, CEO of Polar. “I have maybe 35 co-op students right now working for me, and they get partnered up with a mentor. They don’t realize it, but they are actually the mentor. I see something different in co-op students that I don’t get in full-time staff.”
“We have to keep innovating, we have to keep developing new products and services to stay relevant to our clients who are in a highly competitive industry. When I take a new idea to a co-op student, the response I get is … openness to experimentation [and] just jumping into something they know nothing about and just figuring it out. All of this brings this energy around creativity or innovation around experimentation. I'm constantly challenging my full-time staff to learn from how students think, how students approach problems, how resourceful they are, how literate they are and how efficient they are,” said Gupta.
To remain competitive in today's world, equip your employees with new knowledge and skills. Interested in learning more? Get further insights by watching a recording of the event.