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Upskilling Creates An Agile Workforce Posted on : Jan 21 - 2021

To meet the demands that the future of work will bring, we need to develop an agile workforce. This means that professionals will need to adapt and change with the growing and shifting needs of businesses that are being faced with continual pressure to increase profits. This needs to happen while also shifting to automation, more data-driven approaches and competitive pressure to innovate.

This future workforce will need to adopt an agile philosophy: continuous improvement and optimization as needs arise over time. One of the best ways to ensure this agility is to embrace upskilling, or steadily learning new skills that can be applied in their work, and to fulfill newly created roles and jobs.

Let’s explore three ways that upskilling is important to this future agile workforce.

There will be jobs in five years that don’t exist today.

Our fast-paced world of work is only getting faster. The skills you might have learned a decade ago might be necessary still but think of all the concepts and ideas you have had to learn over your career simply to stay competitive.

For instance, if we look back 20 years ago, there are a number of jobs that didn’t exist, such as the roles of Uber driver, mobile app developer, podcast producer, data scientist, cloud architect, driverless car engineer and telemedicine doctor.

Thus, upskilling becomes incredibly important within the workforce so that when new roles and job descriptions become available, there are those ready to meet the challenge.

Upskilling provides upward mobility.

Just as there are roles and job descriptions that didn’t exist a few years ago, there are skills that are needed in order to support those roles and the work they perform.

This means that learning new skills suddenly in high demand brings with them the ability to ask for a higher salary, title promotion and other benefits of lack of supply. We’ve seen this recently in the technology sector, with cybersecurity, data science and many types of software engineering roles going unfilled for months because of a lack of candidates. View More