Why upskilling your teams can unlock your business’ true potential

Learning to work smarter

Without upskilling, businesses risk irrelevance. At QA we evaluate your current employees’ technical maturity to identify the size and nature of your skills gap. To keep rapidly growing businesses ahead of the curve, we make sure everyone’s learning and career development plans can be aligned with your overall objectives.

It’s not just building on tech specialisms that makes a difference but adding management and leadership skills such as and agile working practices too. Teaching your staff new and efficient internal processes makes sense if you want to get more from your current team and meet the demands of continued business growth.

Training to boost your business’ bottom line

Upskilled employees make more efficient employees, so it’s only natural that productivity improves too. In fact, the positive effects of training and introducing efficient internal processes increase over time. 17% of companies who have recently begun upskilling their staff say the process has been very effective in achieving higher productivity. That percentage grows to 43% for companies with more advanced upskilling programmes.

The longer businesses commit to training their teams, the greater the rewards. And it isn’t just your product or service that benefits but your staff too. 93% of CEOs who enrol their teams in upskilling programmes, not only see an increase in productivity but an improvement in talent acquisition and retention, as well as a more resilient workforce.

Bridging the skills gap to save money and time

Growing a business doesn’t have to mean growing your workforce in huge numbers. Through training and career progression, companies retain knowledge and their best talent, futureproofing themselves for business growth. The savings on recruitment costs are significant too: it’s believed that upskilling your existing team could save you £49,000 per employee. It goes to show personal development can really affect your bottom line.

It’s no surprise then, that successful young businesses look internally and to upskilling to continue their growth. A predicted skills shortage by 2030 means that 5 million workers could become acutely under-skilled in basic digital skills. And up to two-thirds of the UK workforce could face some level of under-skilling by the end of the decade.

Forward-looking businesses place a greater emphasis on producing their own bespoke talent rather than pursuing the expensive few. It’s an approach backed by McKinsey, who estimate that in around 75% of cases, it makes strong economic sense to reskill an employee.                             

Upskilling to unlock your investment potential

Training your teams in the latest technology can help your business stand out from the competition. Investors want to see companies working in agile ways and using the latest tools to reassure them that the business is financially stable and has growth potential too.

Enrolling your teams learning and development programmes is one way to give investors that confidence and to show your commitment to staying ahead of the curve. It’s not just wishful thinking – the stats show that 15% of companies beginning to upskill their teams experience greater innovation. This grows to more than half of companies in the advanced stages of upskilling.

Curious about how upskilling can transform your business? Speak to one of our team to find out about the best training for your needs and sign up to our email updates.