Upskilling Versus Reskilling

Given ongoing disruptors including technological advancements, economic shifts, and evolving business priorities, adapting skills to the latest market demands is critical to both businesses and employees. In our forthcoming research regarding skills velocity, we find that 32% of the average job’s skills have changed over the past three years.

To address shifting skills and business needs, more organizations are embracing and prioritizing upskilling and reskilling to future-proof their workforces. While the terms upskilling and reskilling are often used interchangeably, it’s important to understand key differences between the two and how each can benefit both your organization and employees.

What is Upskilling and Reskilling?

Upskilling is the process of current employees learning new skills or enhancing existing skills to improve performance in their role or advance in the same industry, focus area, or career path. Effective upskilling enables employees to take a skills-based approach to training and development that aligns with the organization’s strategic goals. Upskilling also helps employees adapt to changing job requirements, technological advancements, or industry trends, which makes them more valuable and productive in their current roles.

Despite the importance and relevance of upskilling, resources related to upskilling are often underutilized. Research from Reputation Leaders and DeVry University found that while 80% of employers say they offer upskilling benefits, only about half of workers use them, leading to a significant missed opportunity for both employees and organizations.

On the other hand, reskilling is when employees learn an entirely different set of skills, often in preparation for a new role unrelated to their current job or industry. Organizations and employees typically turn to reskilling when specific industries or roles face significant disruptions or transformation. In these cases, existing skills or jobs may no longer be relevant and reskilling can help employees learn new, in-demand skills to take on new roles and improve job security. 

As technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, reskilling is more important than ever before to business growth and economic advancement. The World Economic Forum projects that 23% of global jobs will change in the next five years due to industry transformation, including through artificial intelligence and other disruptors.

Key Differences Between Reskilling and Upskilling

While both upskilling and reskilling aim to enhance an employees’ skill sets and address skills gaps for organizations, some of the key differences relate to which types of skills employees focus on learning and the desired outcomes of their training and development efforts.

The following chart breaks down how upskilling and reskilling differ from one another. 

The Benefits of Upskilling and Reskilling

A survey of talent development leaders conducted by the Association for Talent Development (ATD) found that 74% of talent development professionals report current skills gaps in their organization and 75% expect skills gaps in the future.

Both upskilling and reskilling offer significant advantages to both organizations and employees.  Companies benefit from more skilled, adaptable, and engaged workforces, while employees benefit from improved job security, career advancement, and personal growth.

Reskilling and Upskilling Success Stories 

Many forward-thinking companies prioritize reskilling and upskilling employees to fill skills gaps and help ensure employees skills remain relevant in the future. Below, we’ve highlighted examples of two well-known brands that place an emphasis on a skills-based, always learning work culture. 

Progressive Insurance Reskills Non-Tech Staff for IT Roles

In response to declining retention rates and technical skills gaps, in 2021, Progressive Insurance launched an internal IT Programmer Bootcamp. Through the bootcamp, non-technical staff are offered reskilling resources to take on more technical roles, including a 15-week intensive training program, access to a training assistant, and regular check-ins with an IT manager. 

Employees who have participated in the program include customer support representatives, underwriting specialists, and claims representatives and the reskilling program prepares them for IT apps programmer associate roles. 

The IT Programmer Bootcamp helps Progressive address critical skills gaps while improving engagement and retention by showing a commitment to employees’ career growth. It also enables Progressive to expand its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts by helping employees who may not otherwise have the resources or time to learn technical skills on their own. 

Amazon’s Upskilling 2025 Pledge

In 2021, Amazon pledged $1.2 billion to offer 300,000 employees access to education and skills training programs as part of its Upskilling 2025 initiative. This program helps Amazon employees learn critical in-demand skills they need to succeed in higher-paying technical and non-technical roles—-both internally at Amazon and elsewhere. A primary goal of Upskilling 2025 is to create viable career pathways in high-growth focus areas. 

Upskilling 2025 includes a variety of opportunities across skill sets and roles. A few examples include:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) Grow Our Own Talent: Amazon employees and entry-level candidates with non-traditional backgrounds receive on-the-job training and job placements within AWS data centers, such as data center technicians and data center engineering operations technicians. Program participants complete in-person training for up to six months. 

• Machine Learning University (MLU): This program helps Amazon employees with technology and coding backgrounds learn the necessary skills for high-demand machine learning jobs. MLU is divided into six-week modules taught by more than 500 Amazon machine learning scientists and requires only half a day of participation each week the program requires only half to one full day of participation a week. While the program started with a small group of employees, it’s on pace to train thousands of employees in machine learning.

Using Standardized Skills to Reskill Your Workforce 

Effective upskilling and reskilling requires having a complete understanding of the skills you currently have at your organization, existing skills needs and gaps, and any emerging skills you may need to support your business in the near future. 

The most important element of that process is having a consistent definition of skills. Lightcast Open Skills solves that problem: a user-friendly taxonomy of more than 34,000 skills created by a team of expert economists and labor market analysts. Using data in the Lightcast Open Skills Library, you can conduct a skills assessment of your organization, identify upskilling and reskilling opportunities, and create career pathways, either within the same linear path or by identifying how workers’ existing skills overlap with adjacent industries and occupations. 

Integrated skill categories and subcategories can also help you group skills and easily view related skills to develop tailored upskilling, reskilling, and other training programs for your employees.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Lightcast’s advanced labor market analytics solutions can help you build an agile, skills-based organization, get in touch.