A lot has changed over the past few years. In some ways, the world is unrecognizable, and the job market is no exception.
Workplaces have adopted technologies at an accelerated rate – some say at the pace of “decades in days” – and moved to remote or hybrid workplace models. Some industries have dramatically struggled while others have thrived. Millions of people have been laid off from their jobs, while others have quit and gone in search of new opportunities, creating a “candidate’s market” in many sectors. People are switching careers entirely, starting new businesses, or simply looking for ways to advance their careers.
If you want to do any of these things, upskilling is an important part of the process. And, frankly, it’s something everyone should be doing, regardless of whether we’re changing jobs at the moment or not. Technological advancement these days is such that nobody knows what any given job or industry will look like two, five, or ten years from now. If you have any plans to advance your career at any point in time and don’t want to continue doing the same thing forever, or if you want to just stay current and not have your skills and knowledge become obsolete, work on upskilling or reskilling.
What is upskilling?
Upskilling is the act of advancing one’s skills and acquiring new skills through education and training. Upskilling allows people to stay on top of new technologies, keep up with best practices, stay current in their jobs, advance careers, and increase salaries.
When we’re younger, at the beginning of our careers, and new to the workforce, it’s standard practice and expected of us to be learning and acquiring new skills. However, somewhere along the way, we tend to start thinking we’ve learned enough. We figure we’ve got all the skills we’ll ever need and that they’ll be enough to keep us employed for the rest of our lives. This is never the case. Not today. Everything is constantly changing, and we need to keep up.
Someone who is always willing to learn will find new ways to bring value to an organization, and that’s why a “willingness to learn” ranks high on lists of the most in-demand soft skills by employers.
How to upskill and reskill
So, how does one go about upskilling and reskilling? Here are six ways to upskill and grow your career.
Identify gaps in your skill set
Take the time to think about where you want to go in your career and how you will get there. What skills do you need to get where you want to go? Take a look at job descriptions for positions you aspire to, and read the required skills sections.
That way, you can find where your gaps are and start working to fill them in. These gaps might be in the areas of soft skills or hard skills. Perhaps you need to learn to manage your time better, solve problems, or communicate (soft skills), or maybe you want to learn to code, design graphics, build websites or use a software system like Salesforce (hard skills).
Learn by reading
Read, read, and then read some more. Reading is one of the best and easiest ways to learn new things. Read books about your industry and books that teach new skills. Read blogs and articles by people you admire. Read biographies and history books.
Reading books can help you directly acquire new skills, and it can also help you indirectly by helping you expand your general knowledge about the world, the people in it, history, and society. Reading can also help you figure out what you need to learn and how this applies to expanding or changing your career.
Also, don’t forget to take advantage of the time during your workout, commute, or other downtimes to listen to audiobooks and podcasts.
Take courses to learn new skills
The array of available online courses and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) through which you can learn new skills from educational institutions and companies is dizzying. If we look at Data Science, for example, one of the most in-demand skills for 2022, you can find any number of both free and paid courses through sites like Coursera and edX. Another example is this course on Udacity, called Intro to Data Science.
The course surveys foundational topics in data science, providing an intro to the topic for beginners to “give you the opportunity to sample and apply the basic techniques of data science.”
Search for courses on any skill, hard or soft, and you will find it.
Ask for stretch opportunities at your current job
A “stretch responsibility” or “stretch assignment” is one that is beyond your current skill set or knowledge level and that will require you to learn new things in order to do it. A stretch opportunity may mean taking on a temporary assignment or permanent additional responsibilities.
Examples of stretch opportunities may include:
Managing a new project outside of your usual scope.
Taking on responsibilities outside of your scope.
Delivering a presentation.
Implementing a new initiative.
Taking over and failing initiative.
Taking on and managing a team.
Becoming a mentor.
There’s no way to learn quite like just jumping in. Watch for available opportunities to take on new responsibilities or look for places to create them yourself and approach your manager with your plan.
Seek out a mentor
Speaking of mentors, many leaders swear by them. Having a mentor to learn from allows you to acquire knowledge and see firsthand how it can be applied in useful ways. A mentor can help you determine where and how you need to improve your skills.
If you already have a job and your company has a mentorship program, get involved in it and get yourself a mentor. Or you can seek out someone you admire and want to learn from and ask them to be your mentor.
There are no hard and fast rules for how this works, but you do want to keep in mind that people are busy, and making a huge request like this out of the gate would probably seem strange. Instead, connect over some shared interest or a simple question. Get to know them a bit, see how much bandwidth they have available, and then make your ask without being too demanding. Maybe they only have a little time to be helpful. If they do, be grateful. You can also have more than one mentor. Learn from as many people as possible.
Find ways to apply your new and/or improved skills
Once you have improved an existing skill or acquired a new one, start putting it to use. The aforementioned stretch opportunities are one way to do this. If you are not currently working or the option is not available to you at your current job, you have to find other ways to do this.
One is to volunteer. Volunteering is one of the most useful things you can do with your life. Non-profit organizations and charities that are stretched thin are grateful for skills and labour contributions and are great places to practice newly acquired skills that need honing. Maybe you just learned to build websites, and an organization you support needs that sort of help. Or you’re sharpening your writing skills, and they need a blogger or copywriter. Volunteering allows you to do these things while contributing to something you believe in and is also a great way to meet people and make new connections.
Another way to apply your new skill is to help friends who need the kind of assistance you can offer. Or you can start a new project of your own where your skills can be applied. Bonus points if you can make it useful to others. For example, if you’re developing machine learning skills, perhaps you can develop a housing prices predictor, as suggested by geeksforgeeks.org.
Whatever you want to do with your life, you will have more success if you continue to learn and grow. It won’t just improve your chances of career success; it will broaden the scope of your interests and make life more fun, interesting, and exciting. If you are always upskilling and increasing your knowledge base, it will pay off in more ways than one.
