U N D E R T H E M I C R O S C O P E
What is ' upskilling ' and why do you feel it ' s important for senior managers to understand and practice ?
Upskilling is a word that has come to the forefront recently . It is not new , but previously the industry did not use this term widely . Essentially to find the skills you need anytime in your life , career or as a manager you must upskill your team with new capabilities and technology to keep pace with the market .
It is unlikely you can learn everything in your formative educational years , or even in your post graduate programmes , hence upskilling is a continuous learning experience . In modern times where technology has become the norm , upskilling is here to stay .
For managers , upskilling provides a cost-effective way to improve your team ' s capabilities . Having churn and attrition in your team and hiring a new person is a big expense for companies . The way to minimise this is by taking the capable people you already hired and upskilling them to the changing demands of the business .
This in turn leads to increased job satisfaction and longer hiring tenures because of the added investment from both parties . It is a win-win in the corporate world where upskilling leads to stronger productivity , efficiency and employee satisfaction all at once . It is imperative every manager ’ s budget makes this a priority for themselves and their teams .
What are the most significant challenges managers face and how can upskilling help tackle these challenges ?
Today we are noticing many tech companies having to maintain a positive culture and morale . Managers face the impossible task of keeping staff engagement high with a rising paranoia about AI replacing their work and fear of job losses . The challenge is further complicated when shareholders are stripping resources and wanting to drive focus .
When competing priorities exist , managers can use upskilling to refocus their teams without compromising on project delivery . For example , if 20 % of your team lacks that skill set , upskilling allows your team to be able to deliver this missing contribution .
Even in the challenging environments that we face today , upskilling can be used as a low-cost incentive to have everyone feel like you ' ve invested in them . This gives them the potential to contribute today and build stronger careers in the future too . It creates added value in that person ' s life and career and provides managers with the bonus of overcoming these challenges without the need to scale .
How can senior managers improve their skills and what skills should they prioritise improving ?
How they choose to upskill is dependent on their function . If you are a manager with engineering and technology skills , but you lack in the management or financial side , the ability to obtain online certifications from the top institutions in financial analysis or strategy is an excellent way to complement your knowledge .
Look at where your strengths and opportunity areas are and consider the places you can grow and improve to maximise your investment .
The options to achieve your learning goals are flexible and varied . We offer credentials , degrees , compressed credentials ( badging ), certificate programmes and microcredentials which can be completed in a few months .
AI is progressing and working from home is increasing . How do you see this affecting management and leadership roles in the future ?
It will have a huge impact and happen in phases . Within the last two decades , we have seen major strides with automation , predictive analytics and how we deal with repetitive processes .
Today , we can train these models on extremely large swathes of data so that they ' re starting to do some critical thinking . We need to shift our mindset away from AI being a purely automation tool and unlock its power to generate real-world insights .
Managers must be ready to harness AI and have their team thinking at higher levels to ask better questions and improve efficiency . Hence the human and AI management complex that develops will mirror the revolution of the personal computer and it will be the next stage of growth .
For managers to leverage this they must make investment and ownership a priority . They must separate the skills that the AI tools will give them versus the contribution from team members .
For example , soft skills that give the ability to look at insights and make business decisions off the back of judgement calls will now rest with people , good team members and managers . Whereas the number of sprints and the robotic processes associated with AI will continue in the short term and medium term to be automated . In the future , we could see more input from AI making judgement calls but at this stage this capability is still premature . �
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