Let’s talk about upskilling outcomes and ownership

Survey after survey on skilling points out one thing: upskilling is the need of the hour. Be it the uncertainty about certain jobs or the current macroeconomic headwinds or the innovation of new generative AI tools, upskilling is often a common factor in everyone’s quest to be future-ready in the chosen career.

But for all of us who are thinking of where to start when it comes to upskilling, there are three critical questions:

What’s the real benefit? Who owns it? And where/how can we get started?

Let’s start with the benefit. Great Learning in its Upskilling Trends report 2023 shared some perspectives. Upskilling, according to the study, helped 43% of the professionals gain career growth in its own organisation, while 23% were able to switch to another domain and 18% were able to secure a new job in 2022.

So, whether or not one is searching for a new job or a career shift, upskilling could simply help us up the game, even in our current work.

Let’s move to the second question.

Who owns the upskilling?
Another interesting insight came from the Great Learning report: 82% of the surveyed companies’ learning and development budgets are spent on training freshers.

That seems intuitive as well. In the early stages, organisations need to invest more in training. But this refers more to skilling than upskilling. Ritesh Malhotra, Business Head, Enterprise at Great Learning, says, “At Great Learning, we work closely with organisations in the IT/ITES and BFSI sector and strongly understand the skills they'd like to enable their freshers with.”

Companies ask Great Learning to upskill their freshers in domains like software development, cloud computing and cybersecurity. These organisations want freshers to be project-ready or billable as soon as possible. “So we run pre-boarding programmes, where 80% of the freshers' training is done before their day zero, helping them achieve their goals.”

What about mid-senior roles? Upskilling is even more of a requirement here.
Ritesh says that for mid and senior-level executives, the demand is usually job-role-specific that focus on data-driven decision-making and technical training to help them keep pace with market trends. “We frequently design programmes to enhance skills in the data science/AIML domain and develop specialists like data engineers and AI architects etc to build a highly-skilled workforce for the organisation. These enterprises also rely on us for pre-assessments or skill assessments, so we organise multiple cohorts based on the employee's skill level to make the training more effective."

While specific upskilling programmes are organised by companies, what is also clear is that our upskilling journey may be more incumbent on us to self-learn as we grow in our careers.

So how do we get started? Can the colleges and universities take a lead in enabling this? Or should one look at self-learning options through online education solutions? While both are possible, the New Education Policy and regulators have been pushing for more flexible learning pathways across formal institutional learning and specialised, practical skilling programmes through methods like academic bank of credits. This could mean that higher education could cease to be a linear activity and people could keep returning to skilling courses and even college credits/certificates, over time, to upskill.

Rakesh Gupta, Founder and Managing Partner, LoEstro Advisors, shares some interesting market perspectives that can make this journey easier, with the changes being ushered in by the New Education Policy. Private players – domestic and foreign – have already begun to explore the possibilities inherent in this sector. “The NEP has kickstarted this shift by accommodating a market-driven approach to higher education – one that prioritises professionalism and accountability and is open to global influences. If properly supported, this approach can drive competition, increase innovation, and improve learning outcomes, all to the nation’s ultimate benefit. By educating a cohort equipped with cutting-edge education and coupling it with a global outlook, India can position itself as a leader in the global knowledge economy,” he adds.