The Harvard Business Review published the book, *Reskilling and Upskilling,* and while I was listening to its core themes on Deepstash, I realized that our market has the same turmoil. We are both laying off staff and desperately trying to hire. I see announcements both ways, and I feel like I’m in some kind of frenzied market where no one gets to see the whole picture.
Jobs Are Disappearing, Skills Are Not
But the book gave me encouragement, because the authors shared these clear trends:
- The skills gap that has us hiring and laying off is not cyclical, it is permanent. Just think of how much technology a gift officer has to learn now to cultivate a prospect: email or LinkedIn for the first touch, maybe AI to draft the post-visit letter, contact report, and proposal, and your organization’s CRM to input the contact report, notes, and strategy/stage updates. As late as 2003 I was working with a gift officer who still had his assistant use shorthand to write his letters, some 20 years after it was taught.
- “Jobs are Disappearing, Skills Are Not” is the second concept. Staff have to adapt a lot faster to new job requirements. For instance, prospect research was a research and writing job, but now is an assessment/communications job requiring business acumen, accounting and finance knowledge, and ability to assemble large pieces of data. Twice I was at organizations where several staff retired rather than learn the latest Microsoft technology (DOS to Windows the first time, in-house system to a larger prebuilt CRM the second). What would those staff do around AI? Or computing the gift value of Bitcoin?
The book emphasizes that “reskilling is a business survival issue.” Frankly, it is cheaper to reskill a current staff member than to hire a new one. A new one has access to only salary surveys and has to be onboarded, sometimes with moving expenses covered. A current staff member picking up a new skill is already trained in the company ethos, has already sorted out internal relationships, and is already invested in your organization’s success. One of the morale busters I have noticed in my career is hiring someone in to do work that an internal staff is spending personal time and money to train for.
Skills Expire Faster Than Ever
The problem is that we can no longer train someone on a specific task and leave him to do the same work for his tenure. The work changes too often. Nonprofits support their staff with conferences but should also send staff to new skills classes and workshops. The book notes that “technical skills expire in ~3-5 years” but also notes that faster moving fields (AI, computing) likely move faster. My own skills in data science not only moved from SPSS and SAS through Clementine and DataDesk to R then Python, but the continual stream of new machine learning and AI techniques has me learning all the time.
The best way to retain good staff is to give them a path forward. Some staff will not want their workday to change, but those who want to move up either the skills or power ladder will go work somewhere else if they sense a wall (or ceiling). Meanwhile, the best way to have optimal output from staff is to continually train them – technical, management, and leadership skills – so they perform better not only on their own roles but also within and across departments.
The book pushes managers to take responsibility for giving staff training, stretch goals, upwardly-mobile projects. Of course, most of us have done work above our pay grade in hopes of getting promoted; we have to keep in mind to advocate for that promotion/job upgrade should the staff earn it.
Reskilling: The Solution to Staff Turnover and Stagnation
My final quote from this book: “People don’t fear learning, they fear becoming irrelevant.” I feel the two-edge sword in that statement: Some leaders often fight new technologies and strategy because they worry about how it will change their day and a lot of staff that I have worked with expressed worry over the technology change making them redundant.
I think that reskilling and upskilling are two ways to reduce staff loss and lost productivity that comes from empty positions. I also think that reskilling and upskilling is a way to help calcified staff members either get unstuck or self select off of your staff, leaving you free to hire staff who can be on your ever-changing journey with you.