Upskilling Your Talent Is Not Even a Question

Is your credit union investing in your most valuable resource – your people? Developing your people by improving their skills and engaging them in learning is not an option. Hiring alone cannot fill talent needs, as employees with the right skills are becoming increasingly scarce. Low unemployment rates, limited mobility across labor markets and an aging and retiring workforce are all at work to shrink the candidate pool. Everyone seeks technical skills combined with the people skills of leadership, creativity, empathy and collaboration. Talent demand outpaces supply.

Yet, most companies are not investing enough to boost the capabilities of their employees. Leaders are aware, however, that their organizations must do more. Indeed, for several years the PwC annual CEO survey listed availability of talent as among the top concerns. PwC’s 2020 CEO survey report makes clear that leaders know talent must be developed from within. But awareness is not enough. PwC uncovered that only 18% of CEOs globally and less than 10% in North America believe that their organization has made “significant progress” in establishing needed upskilling programs. In the important area of digital skills, a separate PwC employee study found that only a third of those surveyed thought they had opportunities to develop them.

Still, people are prepared to learn, and employees are quite mindful that today it’s likely that their skills will become outdated. PwC’s employee survey found that 53% believed that automation will significantly change their job or make it obsolete within the next 10 years. Seventy-seven percent thought they would need to learn new skills and be retrained to have a chance of future employability. Illustrating the point, a recent IBM study found that a skill learned today will be about half as valuable in just five years, and the useful life of technical skills is even shorter.

Your organizational culture is the primary defense in this ever-changing competitive talent marathon. Your culture sets the stage for recruiting, developing and retaining top talent. Your brand as an employer is a competitive differentiator that provides an advantage in attracting and retaining the best people. Organizations want to employ people who are willing to learn, and learners look for employers that will support them in advancing the skills they need to build their careers. Indeed, Gallup recently reported that 59% of millennials, who currently comprise more than half of the U.S. labor force, think it’s extremely important for employers to provide opportunities to learn and grow. They select, and tend to stay with, employers that do so.

Envision your credit union as a learning organization that highlights the values of career development and trust. People are open to new thinking, especially the potential to grow their capabilities. They trust that there is alignment between their personal progress and the organization’s goals that goes beyond the bottom line. A learning culture creates coordination between a person’s interests, strengths, and the abilities and skills needed by the organization, which provides a roadmap for learning. Your staff sees that upskilling efforts increases their value to the credit union and improves their employability. When someone’s skills become obsolete, they are not downsized. Pink slips waste talent and deplete your brand in the competitive market for talent. A culture of retention based on upskilling and reskilling burnishes your brand.

Managing a learning culture takes data to track and rate the levels of learning and the quality of the employee experience. Similar to PwC telling us how companies are not making enough progress in upskilling, Gartner research tells how only 12% of organizations effectively use data to inform talent-related strategy. Again, we see that companies must do more. Leadership needs to know what is happening in the culture in order to manage it. Tools are available to track your culture in almost real time, which can feed into a CEO dashboard. Leadership gains a window into the status of the learning culture and progress toward your talent goals. Data collected helps identify talented learners and guides the credit union to methods that work best to close talent gaps. Information illuminates important decisions such as whether to construct in-house learning systems versus acquiring or outsourcing them. Surveys of effectiveness convey whether to maintain or eliminate certain learning approaches.

When your credit union creates the conditions where people are always learning, your culture strengthens, you grow needed skills at home, and your employees are more challenged, engaged, innovative and productive. The positive impact extends beyond your credit union’s staff to your members and to the community you serve.

Stuart R. Levine is Chairman and CEO for Stuart Levine & Associates and EduLeader LLC in Miami Beach, Fla.