Why Employee Upskilling Alone Isn’t Enough: The Case for Capability Building
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SubscribeA lot of businesses swear by skills, but upskilling has nothing on capability building. Learn how to switch to a capability-led strategy
Many organizations will talk about the benefits of upskilling employees, but is upskilling really the best approach to creating a sustainable workforce? Making sure your workforce has the right skills and closing any skills gaps is important for improving job performance, but skills are too transient to contribute meaningfully to long-term strategy.
Enter: Capability building. It goes beyond upskilling to create an agile, future-ready workforce. We’ll dive into how you can transition your upskilling program to strategic, capability-led L&D.
What is employee upskilling?
Employee upskilling is the process of enhancing employee’s existing to better align with an organization’s evolving needs. It also improves an employee’s performance in their role and contributes to their professional development.
Upskilling is different from reskilling, which is teaching new skills in lieu of old ones that are no longer relevant to an employee’s position.
Why upskilling is not the best approach to L&D
A lot of organizations have led with skills in their L&D initiatives, but skills come with one major problem: They’re constantly changing. The average half-life of a skill is now less than five years, which means they’re changing and becoming redundant too quickly to have much of a strategic impact on a business.
The best approach to L&D is actually a capability-led strategy, capabilities being the skills, knowledge, behaviors, processes, and tools that deliver an organizational outcome. This isn’t to say that a strong upskilling program is completely without merit, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of effective L&D. At the end of the day, skills are only a small part of capabilities, alongside knowledge, behaviors, processes, and tools that drive organizational outcomes. All capabilities contain skills, but skills don’t contain capabilities.
Focusing only on upskilling and reskilling is too narrow a focus, especially when capabilities cover so much more ground in terms of what makes an organization tick. While ensuring your workforce is equipped with critical future skills is crucial for business health, only focusing on those skills won’t enable the widespread business transformation needed for organizational success.
Skills are transient in that they’re constantly changing, going out of trend, and ebbing and flowing in terms of relevance. Capabilities don’t change because they’re foundational and derived from organizational strategy. They can just be developed more and more as needed. If you focus on building capabilities instead of closing skills gaps, you get truly strategic L&D.
How to transition from upskilling to capability building
Capability building is a lot more in-depth than upskilling employees. So, transitioning to capability-building is more complicated than tweaking training programs to encompass capabilities. To effectively transition from an upskilling strategy to a capability-led one, you need to create a strategic shift in how L&D initiatives are designed and implemented.
We’ve identified five best practice strategies for turning your upskilling program into a capability-building program:
- Get capability-building buy-in
- Align with organizational priorities
- Perform a capability gap analysis
- Incorporate technology
- Monitor the capability-building process.
Getting buy-in for capability building
It’s no simple task to pivot from employee upskilling to capability-building, especially when everyone is used to the way things have always been done. This lack of buy-in or resistance to change is often the elephant in the room when it comes to failing change programs, given 70% of all change programs fail when there’s a lack of leadership support.
Business leaders invest in upskilling efforts because they can see the value in doing so. Now you just have to show them the value of capabilities. If business leaders only care about specific KPIs and pain points, then you need to show how a capability-led strategy can address them. Maybe the company is scaling or entering new territory in the industry, and leaders are worried about how to market the brand. You need to demonstrate how a capability-building strategy can improve the specific marketing capabilities that will increase brand awareness.
For employees specifically, you need to prove how capability building will solve their pain points. Employees care about professional growth and career paths (in fact, providing these increases employee retention), so if you can demonstrate how capability development improves performance and enables career progression, they’ll be happy to buy-in. It will make it a lot more palatable for leaders and learners alike to embrace the change from upskilling to capability building.
Aligning with organizational priorities
This may sound like a big task, but it’s actually pretty straightforward given all capabilities are derived from organizational strategy. Business capabilities are required at an organizational level to deliver strategic outcomes, while human capabilities are role specific.
You can use a capability framework or business capability map to chart the full scope of your organization’s capabilities and where they fit into the wider strategy. Link those capabilities to learning programs, and they’ll directly impact and improve employee productivity.
The benefit of capabilities being aligned with organizational goals here is that capability-led programs inform business processes like workforce planning, performance management, and learning management. Capabilities come with set competencies (the leveled scale capability performance is measured by) that can be used to evaluate employee performance, reveal capability gaps and development needs, and identify high potential talent for internal mobility.
Performing a capability assessment
Again, capabilities are a lot more in-depth than skills, so assessing them is much more involved than it is trying to assess and identify skills gaps. Capability assessments assess all aspects of a capability, not just skills gaps.
We always recommend performing a few different types of capability assessments to ensure you’re getting a holistic view of employee capabilities. This helps mitigate the risk of performance review bias, because these evaluations of capability come from multiple different sources. And, you can use them to track employee progress using competencies.
Capability assessments are broken down into at least three levels of competency, usually emerging, proficient, and advanced.
- Emerging: At this level, employees are beginners with a basic understanding of their capability, indicating a need for employee development (although the need for development may not always be pressing).
- Proficient: Proficient employees meet expectations and can perform the aspects of their job role well, though some tasks may still require supervision.
- Advanced: Employees at this level are proactive in their role and utilize data analysis to make strategic decisions. Advanced performance goes beyond just having critical skills, focusing instead on all aspects of the capability as a whole.
Incorporating technology
Building capabilities is sustainable for long-term strategy, so it goes without saying you’re your capability-building process should be sustainable too. Too often, organizations approach L&D as a manual task, with learning and performance data stored locally across multiple spreadsheets. Then you just get siloed information, meaning your performance data doesn’t inform learning strategies and vice versa.
Implementing an L&D platform built on capabilities streamlines and automates the learning process. Specifically, we recommend a performance learning management system (PLMS), because it links learning to performance management within the system, meaning businesses can use learning data to inform performance management and decisions.
A PLMS in particular can assign critical capabilities to specific job roles, creating personalized learning pathways for employees to improve performance. It reduces employee turnover because they’re getting the career development they want, and boosts business efficiency.
Monitoring the capability-building process
There’s no point switching from upskilling to capability building if your capability-building process isn’t effective. You need to measure the tangible metrics that indicate successful capability-building: ROI. If employees have improved their capabilities, they’ll be more efficient and productive in their jobs. You’ll be able to see their improvement in changes to their behaviors or actions since completing learning content, which can be measured (again) by competencies. If an employee was at an emerging level before, and is proficient post-learning, then they’ve improved.
A truly effective capability-building strategy creates a culture of continuous learning, so make sure you’re constantly reviewing your capability-building process. It will ensure that capability-building initiatives adapt to business and market changes, developing employees to be agile and future-ready.
Key takeaways
While upskilling is valuable, it doesn’t align employee development with business strategy. It’s better used as one small part of a capability-building strategy.
It’s capabilities that create a truly sustainable and agile workforce, as they’re derived from organizational strategy. Implementing a capability-led strategy informs all HR and business processes, linking learning and performance management, and guiding strategic decisions in workforce planning.