Implementing An Upskilling Plan – 5 Steps
Hiring new employees can be extremely costly in 2025, especially when there is no guarantee of how long they will stay in the position they were hired for. In addition, re-hiring over and over is expensive; employers spend thousands of dollars refilling the same positions each year. There is also a risk factor involved in hiring externally. Employers need to trust new employees – that they have known for a short period – to follow the rules, complete tasks and get along with their co-workers.
This is where upskilling comes into place. Upskilling takes current employees to a higher skill level, which is much more cost-effective than hiring a new employee. In addition, investing in current employees can improve recruitment, retention, and morale. Below are 5 steps to follow when implementing an upskilling strategy within your company.
Upskilling in 5 Steps
- Identify Current Skills
- Establish Upskilling Goals
- Establish Performance Metrics
- Provide adequate learning
- Provide Progress Update
Step 1. Identify Current Skills/Needed Skills
To start, you want to determine the strong points of your current employees. Then, we recommend you create a skills checklist for each employee to help identify their current ability. The checklist should include both the hard and soft skills you want.
Step 2. Establish Upskilling Goals
Next, compare the skills you currently have to the skill you will need in the future to identify skill gaps. Some skills take longer to learn than others; if the skill is complex, this should be reflected in your plan. Finally, identify realistic objectives and start to train employees within the given areas.
Step 3. Establish Performance Metrics
The most important step is setting performance metrics to identify whether the training is effective. If you skip this step, you might spend time and money training a skill with an ineffective method. For upskilling to be effective, you need to measure several areas of a business, such as:
- Employee satisfaction
- Productivity
- Employee retention
- Recruitment
Step 4. Provide adequate learning
Selecting the proper learning format is a critical part of upskilling your employees. Here are a few examples:
- Mentoring
- Certification program
- Peer-to-peer learning
- Online learning
- Job rotation
Step 5. Provide Progress Update
The last step is consistently monitoring your upskilling program’s performance. This step is where your metrics come into play. Using the metrics you decided on in step 3, you will see whether changes need to be made to your upskilling program.
Implementing An Upskilling Plan
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