Upskilling/Reskilling: the importance of continuous learning and growth mindset in developing people talent

With insights from Jim O'Brien, Chief Executive Officer at Tack TMI, at Gi Group Holding company, and Lilia Borrelli, Global Learning & Development Senior Manager – Gi Group Holding

A critical issue facing labour markets today is that increasingly it is difficult to match skills sets available to business’ ever-shifting conditions in work environments and their operational needs. Gi Group holding addresses this issue both internally and for its clients (employers) and candidates. In short, the company walks that talk.

As Jim O’Brien, CEO at Tack TMI, explains, "We put a lot of effort into bridging skills and/or market gaps: both from a client (employer) and candidate perspective. When addressing placement requirements from a B2B perspective, we begin by building an understanding of our clients’ needs. We always first think about the business need or problem we are helping our client to solve. For example, Upskilling/Reskilling might be a solution for addressing a lack of skills in a particular area, putting together a development plan, or correcting an imbalance in the workforce and/or a lack of candidates." ?

Upskilling/Reskilling programmes are services that Gi Group has long offered its clients (employers) and candidates, but which it has also implemented internally to ensure its own employees across all companies in the Holding have the skills needed to adapt to evolving client and candidate needs and labour markets seeking talent ready to respond to transformational trends.

Lilia Borrelli, Global Learning & Development Senior Manager at Gi Group Holding clarifies how this works:

"At Gi Group Holding, our professional and technical training programmes involve all people across the organization, depending on their type of work and seniority. We include educational support for developing soft skills as well as managerial and leadership skills, and we have learning initiatives organised to support people development across all business lines. We offer programmes that stem both from employees’ personal initiative as well as through Gi Group direct invites. In both cases, we provide training sessions and content in live and on demand formats via our eLearning platform."

Gi Group Upskilling/Reskilling solutions are not industry or geography dependent as they addresses universal needs. From a B2C perspective, understanding the needs of the market, anticipating future needs, and using Gi Group knowledge of the staffing industry and future trends allows the company to map a candidate’s experience and ambitions and match those to available or future roles to which they could transition. Thus Upskilling/Reskilling programmes makes candidates more competitive and gives them the opportunity to move towards roles that are better for them and in demand. This is all part of a fundamental change in approaches to staffing and recruitment in past years.

Jim O’Brien points out:

"The answer to an employer’s placement problems used to be to release otherwise capable people that lacked required skills and replace them with new people (especially as candidates became scarcer and more expensive to employ). However, the best way for companies to tackle current worker and skills shortages is to explore the option of reskilling. This saves time on search and recruitment efforts. Plus, thanks to working with known employees and experts, it ensures that the company culture is maintained, that staff know the company and its values, and that the costs of recruiting and onboarding are massively reduced."

Across the Gi Group, teams use Upskilling/Reskilling programmes to fulfil the company’s vision for Sustainable Work. Not only does Gi Group look to help cut costs and streamline processes from the client (employer) end, but also, when working with candidates. It wants to change people’s lives for the better. Gi Group and Tack TMI do this by providing skills needed to transition to more fulfilling roles and to create lifelong employability. This boosts job seekers’ and employees' intrinsic motivation (which means they are very productive) and helps them stay relevant and pursue jobs that are always in demand. For employers who value Upskilling/Reskilling, it means they can recruit for values first and ensure employees are a great cultural and ethics fit. These same employers can also be confident that their greatest asset, their people, has good intentions to do quality work; i.e., employees will take care of the company and its customers and they will stay longer while still being consistently ?productive.

As Lilia Borrelli adds describing the Gi Group internal view, "Our main objective is to be agile in our processes and deliver programmes that best support employee-participant needs. There are no sectoral or industry-defined limitations for our Upskilling/Reskilling activities. Ultimately, content and structure depend on the specific training needs coming from the goals of participating organisations and individuals. Likewise, we see these programmes as part of continuous learning efforts: a concept that is part of Gi Group’s core values."

Upskilling/Reskilling is critical to sustainable work strategies and Gi Group believes that more and more companies will adopt this tool in the future as they seek to build skilled, loyal teams to help fulfil their businesses’ missions.

For further info, check us out at Gi Group Holding