The workplace landscape continuously evolves, but one truth endures: a well-trained employee is priceless. However, despite the buzz around upskilling and reskilling, a widening gap exists between management’s enthusiasm and employees’ actual response.
The Manager's Perspective: An Essential Investment
For business leaders, developing people’s skills is a strategic imperative for several key reasons:
Adapt to Survive
According to Europe’s Digital Decade: Digital Targets 2030, over 90% of companies must achieve minimum levels of digital intensity within a few years, requiring mandatory investment in resources and skills that Europe deems essential. Yet companies already struggle to find personnel with suitable skills to implement competitiveness-enhancing projects (skill mismatch), let alone meet European regulations.
The challenge is significant. A 2023 survey by Local Area Network (LAN) found that when companies cannot find workers with suitable skills for projects, 16% abandon them entirely, 11% outsource them, while 38.9% attempt to quickly retrain existing staff.
Cost Control
Training staff internally and moving them into key roles has proven highly effective in many documented cases.
IBM demonstrated this with a notable initiative where employees facing restructuring could choose between severance pay or transitioning to new roles with weekly training in their free time—effectively sharing retraining costs. This approach yielded multiple benefits: increased productivity, better employee adaptation, lower turnover, and training cost savings of more than double the investment.
For more information, you can read the article in Harvard Business Review.
Soft Skills Training
A study conducted by MIT Sloan and other universities across five factories of Shahi Exports Private Limited, a leading Indian garment manufacturer, highlighted the significant impact of soft skills in the workplace. The study found that a 12-month soft skills training program, encompassing communication, problem-solving, time and stress management, yielded a remarkable 250% return on investment within just eight months of its completion. Surprisingly, these soft skills proved valuable even in seemingly repetitive roles like those on textile assembly lines, leading to notable improvements in productivity, efficiency, and employee retention.
This finding is further corroborated by research from the Stanford Research Institute International, which emphasizes the crucial role of soft skills in long-term career success, estimating their contribution to be around 75%, compared to 25% for hard skills. While this echoes the Pareto principle, it’s important to remember that technical skills remain essential and can significantly impact an individual’s success.
What Do Employees Really Think?
The outlook is bleak:
Training Yes, But When and How?
The common saying “Time spent on training equals time not working” reflects a real concern. Companies typically dedicate 102.6 hours—over 12 working days—to employee training. Workers report this as excessive given their daily productivity targets and work priorities. Data from The Industry Report available here.
Lack of relevance or correspondence with the workers' interests.
NTUC LearningHub‘s report Workforce Learning in Workplace Transformation reveals that 40% of employees find corporate training programs inadequate. Key complaints include: Limited Range of Topics Covered (40%), Boredom and Conventional Training Approach (37%), and Low Relevance of Topics for Career Development (18%). The OECD‘s Education at a Glance report shows workers spend roughly 9 days yearly seeking external learning opportunities relevant to their interests and daily challenges—a growing trend since 2020 that companies aren’t tracking.
Fear of Automation.
Despite upskilling efforts, employees fear being replaced by automation and AI, a concern that predates the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2018 CEDEFOP report revealed that this fear affected 30% of the European workforce.
Poor Internal Mobility, High Disengagement, and Isolation.
Gallup’s State of Global Workforce research shows employee satisfaction peaked in 2020 before plummeting during the pandemic and remaining low. The findings are troubling: one in five workers experiences daily loneliness, rising to 25% among remote workers under 35.
Stress, sadness, anxiety, anger, and worry have reached their highest levels since Gallup’s surveys began in 1935.
Europe shows the world’s lowest engagement at 13% (versus 23% globally). Italy mirrors this trend, with just 8% of employees actively engaged—better only than France’s 7%.
Conclusion
These challenges demand a fundamental rethinking of skill development and employee well-being. It’s not just about technology, costs, and productivity—it’s about reimagining the very essence of Human Resources management.
Effective upskilling and reskilling programs require a structured and targeted approach. Viblio utilizes a database of over 3,000 international roles to analyze each employee’s position, assessing both hard and soft skills, and incorporating personality traits identified through a video interview.
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