Upskilling and reskilling have become popular buzzwords. But why the sudden focus on this? Well, a company’s ability to train and develop its employees to expand their skillsets, creates a significant competitive advantage in our increasingly technology-driven world.

It’s easy to fall into a numbers game but apart from missing 70 000 people within tech in Sweden alone, combining that with the fact of exactly how quickly the progress within tech is today, makes us discuss the possibility that roughly 50% of the skills we have today will be obsolete and out of date in just 2-3 years time. If we want to keep good people and the collected overall knowledge and competencies, we need to focus on how we keep developing the skills needed within the company.

And let us just state the obvious, if this was an easy fix it would already have been done. It is not, and as with everything that involves change on a large scale, it has a number of complexities. And we are not just talking about a vast organisation but we are also talking about people – and people can be very reluctant to change. Developing a learning culture takes time, but it’s worth the investment. 

Here’s 7 actionable ways to create a culture of learning:

1. Incite – dare to talk about what skills you, as a team, need to add on and think about on what level you can start.
2. Set up goals – make sure to add specifics when it comes to learning in your sprints and planning.
3. Create a structure – make time to form habits regarding learning and create insight into that it will, initially, take longer time for someone new to it to perform a certain task. Create comfort in the long term effects and benefits.
4. Develop Personalised learning plans – this will make learning more relevant to your employees.
5. Offer one-on-one coaching and support your employees to help them reach their career goals.
6. Lead by example – because your team is looking to you for inspiration. If you are engaged and dedicated to your own continuous learning, it reinforces a learning culture.
7. Create a safe to fail environment – as a leader, talk about your own training, be willing and open to corrections and feedback, and reflect on the mistakes you’ve made.