What Enterprises Should Know About Skill Training

To make an impact in the tight economic environment, L&D teams need to focus on the skills their employees and organizations need.

To effectively start closing the skills gaps within our organizations, learning and development teams across the globe are turning to a skills training approach to provide career development paths and learning interventions.

This article defines skills training and explores the challenges in enterprise skills-based learning. We also set out how to know if the model is a good fit for your organization and, if so, how to implement skills training in your workplace today.

What is skills training?

Skills training is the process of providing employees with training to acquire the necessary skills to fulfill the requirements of their job roles.

While more traditional corporate training programs often focus on the general tasks or responsibilities associated with individual jobs–typically outlined as capabilities or competencies–skills training targets the specific skills needed for a particular job or task.

Skills training is measured by the proficiency level of the skill and its applicability to the role, meaning that as a learning strategy, L&D teams can better prove the impact and ROI of their learning interventions. 

A skills-based learning approach empowers employees to perform their best in their roles and work toward their career development. For an organization, it helps keep retention high and fosters internal mobility.

Related: The Complete Guide to Skilling for Employee Productivity & Retention

The different types of skills

Skills training programs are designed to help learners develop the skills they need in their workflow. 

These include: 

• Hard skills: Specific, teachable abilities or knowledge typically acquired through formal education, training programs, or hands-on experience (e.g. machine learning, video editing).
• Soft skills: Non-technical traits that relate to how individuals interact with others and manage their work (e.g. problem-solving, decision-making). 
• Proprietary skills: The know-how within your organization that is unique to its context and cannot be acquired anywhere else (e.g. proficiency in a custom operating system or in-house programming languages).
• Transferable skills: Soft and hard skills that can be used in different settings and jobs (e.g. critical thinking, data analysis).

Upskilling and reskilling

Skills training can be divided into two types of training methods: upskilling and reskilling. 

Upskilling is skills training that provides employees with the new skills they need to perform better in their roles and expand their current skill set for future roles within the organization.

Reskilling is learning initiatives that give employees the necessary skills to adapt to the changing nature of their roles as their industry or profession evolves.

The evolving landscape of corporate skill training

Organizations are facing supply issues in a competitive skills market. 60% of businesses say that skills gaps in the local market hold back their business transformation. 

Skills-based organizations are 98% more likely to have a reputation as a great place to grow and develop, meaning that more and more talent are looking for organizations where they can develop their skills. 

Moreover, according to our 2024 State of Online Learning Report, employees say that eLearning, along with peer-to-peer learning, works for them and will help them with their skill development.

Challenges in enterprise skill training

Skills-based learning can be challenging to implement within enterprise organizations. These are some of the most common challenges L&D teams face when it comes to adopting skills training manually.

Identifying skills gaps sustainably

To provide employees with the skills development they need, you need a complete picture of the gap between the skills they currently have, and those they need to do their jobs at the expected level. 

Many teams have tried pivoting to skills training, but the manual approach has been long, complex, and costly. Moreover, the resulting skills ontologies are outdated when implemented because skills constantly evolve.

Ensuring training content is engaging and relevant

By creating a clearly defined skills ontology and empowering learners to identify the skills they need to develop, L&D teams can design and deploy skills training learners want to engage with. 

To ensure your job training is engaging and relevant, describe the skills and proficiency levels your learning interventions are targeting in natural and plain language so learners can quickly and easily understand what they are trying to develop.

Evaluating the success of training programs

Only 4% of organizations working to implement large-scale upskilling programs have reached the measurement stage in 2024.

Be sure to clearly define the proficiency levels of the skills you are targeting so you can measure the progress of your skills training programs meaningfully in the context of your organization and show that you are moving the needle. With clearly defined proficiency levels, you can also measure employees in their work because the skills are the work.

Scaling training programs

The key to getting started with skills training is to start small. You don't have to go for a gold standard, enterprise-wide solution from the start, but you should set up solutions proactively rather than reactively.

Start with a trial with a small cohort or team within the organization. A great place to start is where early-stage skills experiments make sense, such as the IT Department. These functions have grown on agile methodologies and are typically receptive to skills development initiatives.

Despite these common challenges with skill-based learning implementation, there is good news. With the latest advances in AI, skills-based learning is easier and more approachable than ever for L&D teams, especially for those in enterprise organizations.

How to know if the skills-based learning model is right for your workplace

Skills training is essential for any enterprise actively looking to close its skills gaps, but how do you know if it will work for your L&D practice, employees, and organization?

Here are three signs that a skills-based learning approach may be beneficial for your workplace:

1. You’re unsure what training needs to be prioritized: A skills-based learning approach will easily identify the skills gaps within your organization in real-time. From here, you can prioritize the upskilling opportunities that will impact your organization's and employees' needs.
2. You have a backlog of training requests that existing content won’t impact: If you're looking to deploy learning interventions that improve the performance of employees, the skills model empowers you to push the right upskilling interventions to the right learners when and where they need them.
3. You’re struggling to demonstrate impact: A skills-based approach enables you and your team to easily track, measure, and show how your upskilling initiatives are closing the skills gaps within your organization.

A step-by-step guide to start implementing skills training

1. Map the skills in your organization

A skills training approach starts with analyzing the skill sets required for employees to do their jobs, with proficiency levels that provide a detailed path for development.

With the right learning solution, you can quickly map out the individual skills within your organization. For example, our Skills platform empowers learners to declare their own skill sets for current or future roles and update their mastery level per skill.

Developing a skills ontology will give you and your team a complete picture of your organization's workforce skills. SkillsGPT can help you complete all the hard work in minutes so you can tweak your skills ontology with relevant stakeholders to ensure it fits your organization's context.

2. Identify the skills gaps

Once you’ve mapped all the skills in your organization, you will need to identify the gap between the current and required skills within your organization that you need to close.

Skills gaps can exist at the individual, team, and organizational levels. At the individual level, you will need to identify the skills gaps associated with each employee. You can identify skills gaps by leveraging team member surveys, employee skills assessments, a skills audit, or AI-powered, L&D-specific tools.

3. Define clear, measurable goals

You need to set clear training objectives to ensure that your learning interventions will close your skills gaps and help employees develop the necessary skills.

Conducting a skills gap analysis will help you and your team identify where best to close your skills gaps according to your organization's required skills, as determined by your skills ontology.

4. Create engaging and relevant content

Relevant content for upskilling will be defined by the expected performance level of the role, the skills your employees need to perform better today, and the proficiency levels. For reskilling initiatives, focus on the skills the employee needs for their new role.

Collaborative learning will go further than other learning approaches in helping you upskill and reskill your larger workforce. With collaborative learning, you and your team can capture and share internal expertise and institutional knowledge across the entire organization. For example,  47% of companies now invest in career mentoring and coaching to boost employee retention.

5. Roll out your skills training program

Launch your upskilling and reskilling training campaigns to start closing critical skills gaps.

If you leverage a learning solution with an AI-powered recommendation feature, you can prescribe your skills training to the right employees when and where they need it. For example, if you’re helping new employees upskill, you can prescribe the content through their onboarding process.

6. Monitor and iterate the training program

Finally, it’s time to start measuring how well your skills training is closing your skills gap (and begin the process again to close the next gap). 

The metrics to watch include new skills learned, skills proficiency and mastery levels, certifications completed, sales figures, or retention rates. An AI-powered skills platform will automate the processes of keeping your skills ontology up to date and help you monitor your impact through a dashboard so you can iterate as necessary.

If you’re looking to start implementing skills training in your organization, we recommend leveraging a platform like Skills by 360Learning that makes it simple and easy to deploy your biggest upskilling initiatives, while helping you understand and keep a pulse on all skills across the enterprise.