Allen wants to retain employees and achieve business success. Who doesn’t? But understanding the importance of preparing for the future of work is not the same as knowing how to upskill your employees. Allen’s professional development efforts need to focus in the right areas to ensure the company has the best talent in place. In this companion piece to our roundup of top skills for 2024, we discuss the role businesses can play in developing employee’s job-specific skills.

Drawing on several predictions, we recently put together a list of key skills employees need for 2024:

• Communication
• Generative AI
• Data literacy and analytics
• Adaptability
• Creativity
• Problem solving
• Collaboration/teamwork
• Sustainability literacy

If you’re like Allen, you might read this list and say “Great, but how do I help my employees build their skills in these areas?” If you’re ready to focus on growing these key skills and improving job specific skills in the workplace, keep reading to see how intentional professional development can help foster these characteristics among team members.

Professional skills evolution

Professional development has always had to evolve. Today, keeping up with the pace of change can be more challenging. But refusing to adapt is not a viable option. In a West Monroe survey of 432 HR professionals and 1,000 U.S. workers, both employers and employees recognized the importance of upskilling. The study found, “Employees are aware of their own abilities, and they expect their employers will reskill them.”

Respondents identified a “significant skills gap,” as the workplace shifts to a more digital-first mindset and employees are required to be more tech-savvy. The management consultant and product engineering firm concluded:

• Employees (58%) expect their employers to tell them what new skills are needed and invest in their development
• Managers need more training in enabling professional development
• The business must engage employees in technology enablement and work to ensure employees feel comfortable about change

With these insights into employee training and development, you may be able to remove some of the roadblocks to upskilling your people. Next, we’ll discuss strategies specific to the in-demand skills of 2024.

Upskilling employees for 2024

Job skill training has long encouraged communication and collaboration. Both are essential to effective teamwork, which underpins business success as well as innovation and even employee engagement. Continuous learning in these areas can help your people advance their professional communication skills and confidence. It’s a win-win as that, in turn, can support enhanced collaboration.

Offering coaching in the importance of communication and the need for attention to word choice, body language, and voice modulation could expand the employee skillset. You might also offer training in emotional intelligence as a lack in this area is often at the root of ineffective communication.

To build the collaboration muscle among your employees, a study in the Harvard Business Review recommended encouraging supporting skills such as “appreciating others, being able to engage in purposeful conversations, productively and creatively resolving conflicts, and program management.” So, instead of Allen and other corporate learning teams trying to tackle collaboration head-on, they might encourage a gratitude culture or offer access to an online certification in conflict management.

Creativity, problem solving, and adaptability are other in-demand skills that can leave training professionals at a loss. Many individuals look at these as innate attributes. If employees don’t already have these strengths, how can an HR professional encourage it? Yet, it is possible to expand these abilities through effective job skills training programs.

The traditional methods of reading a book or taking a class can help. But instead of enrolling team members in Resilience 101, create opportunities for people to flex their creativity, adaptability, or problem-solving skills. Strategies for upskilling employees are wide ranging! You could:

• Sponsor innovation challenges
• Require cross-functional collaborations
• Allocate time for employees to brainstorm
• Set up a platform for team members to ask for and offer input into business problems
• Offer workshops in design thinking, creative writing, human-centric innovation
• Provide flexibility and autonomy to encourage experimentation

Tackling tangible skills development

The intangibility of the soft skills just discussed can make it more challenging to train in these areas. When it comes to encouraging the in-demand hard skills, HR professionals often feel more sure-footed. In-house training has long been the go-to solution for building job-specific skills for your industry. Today, self-paced, online learning is often a more attractive option. Benefits include:

• Autonomy to learn when it is convenient
• Time saved when you can breeze through what’s easy
• Ability to focus on mastery of skills that challenge
• Improved memory performance from lowered pressure setting
• Efficient, consistent global reach

Everywhere employees and development professionals like Allen look, there’s a report or news story touting the transformative power of AI and data. Yet in the hurry to take advantage of this technology, intentional planning and introduction of a measurable program can get short-shrift.

Creating a skilled worker job training plan starts with providing your employees with a clear path to proficiency in generative AI, data literacy and analytics, or sustainability literacy. When you take the time to establish context and the overall impact of these skills, you can improve motivation. Providing employees with time to study and practice skills on company time can also emphasize how much your business values this skills acquisition.

Finally, make adoption and expansion of any of these hard or soft skills a top-down initiative. Sure, frontline customer service workers might not need the same data analytics prowess as the manager digging into trends to determine business opportunities. Yet, by encouraging skills development across your entire organization, you can foster team work and innovation while nurturing your next generation of leader.

Want to focus your own upskilling programs? Run a professional development needs evaluation and find out where you stand. Then, regularly assess success to ensure you’re headed in the right direction.