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Forward-thinking companies embrace upskilling as an essential ingredient to crafting future-ready workforces.

At Western & Southern Financial Group in Cincinnati, Ohio, upskilling takes center stage through a new initiative. "The insurance industry is often faced with regulatory shifts, technological advancements, and evolving customer needs, requiring us to think more strategically about the skills we need to develop and the training we need to provide," explains Katie Oehler, IT talent development consultant. "This led us to develop and launch Skill Sensing across the enterprise."

More than a skills inventory, Skill Sensing is a tool associates use to identify their abilities and rate their proficiency, interest, and enjoyment of each skill. Associates pinpoint skills they aspire to develop while managers gain valuable insights into the skills their associates aim to leverage. Managers use completed skills profiles to evaluate associates' proficiency in each area.

Western & Southern Financial Group's TD team piloted the program in the HR department before expanding it to 22 business units. As of February 2024, 669 associates have used the tool.

By identifying, monitoring, and leveraging associate skills and competencies, Skill Sensing provides several benefits. "As associates identify their strengths and areas for growth, they will be enabled to pursue relevant training and career advancement opportunities," Oehler says. "Associates who feel their skills are recognized and valued are more likely to experience job satisfaction and engagement, leading to increased motivation, productivity, and value-add impact."

Oehler adds that "managers will be able to improve their talent and performance management, resource allocation, and succession planning abilities, while the company will benefit from retention and recruitment success, operational efficiencies, and ability to sustain a competitive advantage."

At Infosys BPM Limited, the TD team turned to upskilling to solve employee preparedness challenges and enable rapid training. "Unprecedented levels of attrition and cost escalation resulted in the TD function having to ensure that talents hired at every level were provided adequate skills to help them scale up at a rapid pace," explains Sharath Chandra, associate vice president and head of L&D at the 54,000-employee subsidiary of Infosys Limited, headquartered in Bengaluru, India.

Infosys BPM developed the Talent Assurance Program (TAP) to help employees scale up for different roles within or across domains, creating a role-ready talent pool in a vast array of domains and technologies. "The idea is to support our global talent to excel in new/enhanced roles with proficiency, speed, and accuracy, thereby producing measurable improvements in business performance," Chandra says.

TAP has two learning paths: role essentials, focusing on behavioral and human skills; and domain role readiness, focusing on domains and subdomains. Information for each learning path "originates from the business where the L&D team receives the data of employees to be upskilled," Chandra notes. Courses feature e-learning and self-paced learning formats with defined timelines for completion.

More than 5,000 employees have completed TAP and exhibited evidence of improvement three months after finishing the program. Feedback from a line managers' survey "demonstrates encouraging results," Chandra concludes.